s. 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