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 is a "paradise of demi-fortunes." Each of them
is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any
place has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking
up and down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity
and private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months
of the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both
have grand old recollections to fall back upon,--times when they looked
forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen in cocked
hats, who built their now decaying wharves and sent out their ships all
over the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port was to be the Tyre
or the Carthage of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like that once
lived in by Lord Timothy Dexter, in Newburyport, remain as evidence of
the fortunes amassed in these places of old. Other mansions--like the
Rockingham House in Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before
you mount the broad staircase)--show that there was