Our professor of chemistry was different.  He was never on dress-parade; he did not pose; he was no snob.  We loved him because he was so genuine.  He had degrees, too, but they were so obscured by the man that we forgot them in our contemplation of him.  We knew that they do not make degrees big enough for him.  I often wonder what degrees the colleges would want to confer upon William Shakespeare if he could come back.  Then, too, I often think what a wonderful letter Abraham Lincoln could and might have written to Mrs. Bixby, if he had only had a degree.  Agassiz may have had degrees, but he didn’t really need them.  Like Browning, he was big enough, even lacking degrees, to be known without the identification of his other names.  If people need degrees they ought to have them, especially if they can live up to them.  Possibly the time may come when degrees will be given for things done, rather than for things hoped for; given for at least one stage of the journey accomplished rather than for merely packing a travelling-bag.  If this time ever comes Thomas A. Edison will bankrupt the alphabet.

In this coil of degrees and the absence of them, I become more and more confused as to majors and minors.  There in college were those two professors both wearing degrees of the same size.  Judged by that criterion they should have been of equal size and influence.  But they weren’t.  In the one case you couldn’t see the man for the degree; in the other you couldn’t see the degree for the man.  Small wonder that I find myself in such a hopeless muddle.  I once thought, in my innocence, that there was a sort of metric scale in degrees—­that an A.M. was ten times the size of an A.B.; that a Ph.D. was equal to ten A.M.’s; and that the LL.D. degree could be had only on the top of Mt.  Olympus.  But here I am, stumbling about among folks, and can’t tell a Ph.D. from an A.B.  I do wish all these degree chaps would wear tags so that we wayfaring folks could tell them apart.  It would simplify matters if the railway people would arrange compartments on their trains for these various degrees.  The Ph.D. crowd would certainly feel more comfortable if they could herd together, so that they need not demean themselves by associating with mere A.M.’s or the more lowly A.B.’s.  We might hope, too, that by way of diversion they would put their heads together and compound some prescription by the use of which the world might avert war, reduce the high cost of living, banish a woman’s tears, or save a soul from perdition.

Be it said to my shame, that I do not know what even an A.B. means, much less the other degree hieroglyphics.  Sometimes I receive a letter having the writer’s name printed at the top with an A.B. annex; but I do not know what the writer is trying to say to me by means of the printing.  He probably wants me to know that he is a graduate of some sort, but he fails to make it clear to me whether his degree