“At any rate, you may take your father’s—I mean my brother’s—word for it.”
“If he had told me so, I would believe it,” said Hector.
“You have it in black and white, in the paper I showed you. What more do you want?”
“I want to be sure that that document is genuine. However, I won’t argue the question now. I have only been giving you my reasons for keeping the name I have always regarded as mine.”
Allan Roscoe thought it best to drop the subject; but the boy’s persistency disturbed him.
CHAPTER VI. SMITH INSTITUTE.
Socrates Smith, A. M., was not always known by the philosophic name by which he challenged the world’s respect as a man of learning and distinguished attainments. When a boy in his teens, and an academy student, he was known simply as Shadrach Smith. His boy companions used to address him familiarly as Shad. It was clear that no pedagogue could retain the respect of his pupils who might readily be metamorphosed into Old Shad. By the advice of a brother preacher, he dropped the plebeian name, and bloomed forth as Socrates Smith, A. M.
I may say, in confidence, that no one knew from what college Mr. Smith obtained the degree of Master of Arts. He always evaded the question himself, saying that it was given him by a Western university causa honoris.
It might be, or it might not. At any rate, he was allowed to wear the title, since no one thought it worth while to make the necessary examination into its genuineness. Nor, again, had anyone been able to discover at what college the distinguished Socrates had studied. In truth, he had never even entered college, but he had offered himself as a candidate for admission to a college in Ohio, and been rejected. This did not, however, prevent his getting up a school, and advertising to instruct others in the branches of learning of which his own knowledge was so incomplete.