bout this person we shall have
accumulated no little circumstantial knowledge;--thus, his face, figure,
gait, his mode of dressing, of saluting, perhaps even of speaking, may be
familiar to us; yet who he is we know not. In another department of our
consciousness, there is a very familiar name, which we have never found
the person to match. We have heard it so often, that it has idealized
itself, and become one of that multitude of permanent shapes which walk
the chambers of the brain in velvet slippers in the company of Falstaff
and Hamlet and General Washington and Mr. Pickwick. Sometimes the person
dies, but the name lives on indefinitely. But now and then it happens,
perhaps after years of this independent existence of the name and its
shadowy image in the brain, on the one part, and the person and all its
real attributes, as we see them daily, on the other, that some accident
reveals their relation, and we find the name we have carried so long in
our memory belongs to the person we have known so long as a
fellow-citizen. Now the slack--water gentry are among the persons most
likely to be the subjects of this curious divorce of title and
reality,--for the reason, that, playing no important part in the
community, there is nothing to tie the floating name to the actual
individual, as is the case with the men who belong in any way to the
public, while yet their names have a certain historical currency, and we
cannot help meeting them, either in their haunts, or going to and from
them.

To this class belonged Wentworth Langdon, Esq. He had been "dead-headed"
into the world some fifty years ago, and had sat with his hands in his
pockets staring at the show ever since. I shall not tell you, for
reasons before hinted, the whole name of the place in which he lived. I
will only point you in the right direction, by saying that there are
three towns lying in a line with each other, as you go "down East," each
of them with a Port in its name, and each of them having a peculiar
interest which gives it individuality, in addition to the Oriental
character they have in common. I need not tell you that these towns are
Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland. The Oriental character they have
in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny
gardens round them. The two first have seen better days. They are in
perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished,
gentility. Each of them i