“I confess I don’t understand. Do you mean that I shall leave the coffee pot for some other member of the company to scour?”
“No. I mean this is your off night for word-slinging. The professor is going to tell us some things and we want to hear him. So, ‘dry up.’”
“I bow my head in contriteness and deep humiliation. You have the floor, Professor.”
“May I ask you young gentlemen not to call me ‘professor’?” Dunbar asked very earnestly.
“Why, of course, we will do as you like about that,” answered Larry; “we have been calling you ‘professor’ merely out of respect, and you told us you were or had been a professor in a college.”
“Yes, I know, and I thank you for your impulse of courtesy. I used the word descriptively when I told you I had been a ‘professor’ of Natural History. Used in that way it is inoffensive enough, but when employed as a title—well, you know every tight-rope walker and every trapeze performer calls himself ‘professor.’”
“Well, you must at least have a doctorate of some kind,” said Dick, “and so you are entitled to be addressed as ‘Dr. Dunbar.’”
“No, not at all. Of course a number of colleges have offered me baubles of that cheap sort—asking to make me ‘LL.D.,’ or ‘Ph. D.,’ or ‘L. H. D.,’ or some other sham sort of a doctor, but I have always refused upon principle. I hate shams, and as to these things, they seem to me to work a grievous injustice. No man ought to be called ‘Doctor’ unless he has earned the degree by a prescribed course of study and examinations. Honorary degrees are an affront to the men who have won real degrees by years of hard study. With two or three hundred colleges in this country, each scattering honorary degrees around and multiplying them every year, all degrees have lost something of their value and significance.”
“How shall we address you then?” asked Larry.
“Simply as ‘Mr. Dunbar.’ The President of the United States is entitled to no other address than ‘Mr. President.’ In a republic certainly ‘Mr.’ ought to be title enough for any man. Call me ‘Mr. Dunbar,’ please.”