Elsie Venner | Page 9

a kind of
state, upon its own resources, and the new brood, which must live
mainly by its wits or industry, and make itself rich, or shabbily subside
into that lower stratum known to social geologists by a deposit of
Kidderminster carpets and the peculiar aspect of the fossils constituting
the family furniture and wardrobe. This slack-water period of a race,
which comes before the rapid ebb of its prosperity, is familiar to all
who live in cities. There are no more quiet, inoffensive people than
these children of rich families, just above the necessity of active
employment, yet not in a condition to place their own children
advantageously, if they happen to have families. Many of them are
content to live unmarried. Some mend their broken fortunes by prudent
alliances, and some leave a numerous progeny to pass into the
obscurity from which their ancestors emerged; so that you may see on
handcarts and cobblers' stalls names which, a few generations back,
were upon parchments with broad seals, and tombstones with armorial
bearings.
In a large city, this class of citizens is familiar to us in the streets. They
are very courteous in their salutations; they have time enough to bow
and take their hats off,--which, of course, no businessman can afford to
do. Their beavers are smoothly brushed, and their boots well polished;
all their appointments are tidy; they look the respectable walking
gentleman to perfection. They are prone to habits,--they frequent
reading-rooms,--insurance-offices,--they walk the same streets at the
same hours,--so that one becomes familiar with their faces and persons,
as a part of the street- furniture.
There is one curious circumstance, that all city-people must have
noticed, which is often illustrated in our experience of the slack- water
gentry. We shall know a certain person by his looks, familiarly, for
years, but never have learned his name. About 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 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