If you be a person that have lived for a long time in any large town, you must have ere this felt the dreadful inconvenience of knowing and being known by every body. The courtesy of society demands that, on meeting any one in the street, of whom you have the slightest acquaintance, you must _not_ “affect to nod,” like Alexander, but give a real _bona fide_ nod, or, if you please, a bow, as a mark of respect or regard—a practice which leads to a thousand disagreeable sensations in the day, till at last you almost resolve that your progress shall be like that of a British war-chariot—CUTTING right and left, without regard to man, woman, or child. It is not that you have any abstract disinclination to pay this tribute to friendship; it is the frequency and the iteration of the thing that annoys you. You could tolerate, perhaps, a certain number of nods in the day—_I_ would willingly compound for twenty—and it would be all very well if you only met a friend on the street once in the month or so. But this is not the way of it: you cannot be abroad two hours (supposing that you are of long standing in the town) without meeting fifty people and upwards, to whom you must “vail your haughty head,” and, what is worst of all, the half of these are people whom you met and nodded to yesterday, and the day before, and every day before that again, back to the creation of the world. With many of these persons, your acquaintance at first was of the very slightest nature. You met the man in a steam-boat, and had your respective names mentioned by a friend. You left a room one day as he was entering, and you were introduced, and, after exchanging only three words, made a friendly bow to each other, and parted. Perhaps he was introduced to you passingly on the street by some person to whom you had been introduced several years before, in the same transient way, by an individual whose acquaintance of you was originally of so slight a character that you had even then forgot for some years how it commenced. Your reminiscences upon the whole subject are a Generation of Shadows, traced back to Nothing. Possibly you sat next to him one night, “consule Planco,” at a mason-lodge, and to this blessed hour have never so much as learned his name. When it happens that you do not see or meet these acquaintances for six months after your first rencontre, the affair has by that time got cool enough to justify you mutually in cutting each other. But in most cases it happens quite differently. On the very morning, perhaps, after having scraped acquaintance with a merry fellow in some promiscuous company, you meet him going abroad, like yourself, to his place of business. As nothing of the world, or its concerns, has as yet got between you and your recollections of last night’s conviviality, you pull up with him for a minute, shake hands, laugh cordially in each other’s faces, hope each other is quite well after yesternight’s business, remark