“There's some bird dog blood in Spot,” says the Stray Boy, sizing me up careful. “He's got some collie in him, too,” says Squint Thompson. “His voice sounds just like a collie's when he barks.” “But his tail is more like a coach dog's tail,” says Tom Mulligan. “His hair ain't, though,” says the Stray Boy. “Some of his hair is like a setter's.” “His teeth are like a mastiff's,” says Mutt Mulligan's boy Tom. And they went on like that; I never knew before there were so many different kinds of thoroughbred dog. Finally Freckles says: “Yes, he's got all them different kinds of thoroughbred blood in him, and he's got other kinds you ain't mentioned and that you ain't slick enough to see. You may think you're running him down, but what you say just _proves_ he ain't a common dog.” I was glad to hear that. It was beginning to look to me that they had a pretty good case for me being a mongrel. “How does it prove it?” asked the Stray Boy. “Well,” says Freckles, “you know who the King of Spain is, don't you?” They said they'd heard of him from time to time. “Well,” says Freckles, “if you were a relation of the King of Spain you'd be a member of the Spanish royal family. You fellows may not know that, but you would. You'd be a swell, a regular high-mucky-muck.” They said they guessed they would. “Now, then,” says Freckles, “if you were a relation to the King of Switzerland, too, you'd be just _twice_ as swell, wouldn't you, as if you were only related to one royal family? Plenty of people are related to just _one_ royal family.” Tom Mulligan butts in and says that way back, in the early days, his folks was the Kings of Ireland; but no one pays any attention. “Suppose, then, you're a cousin of the Queen of England into the bargain and your grand-dad was King of Scotland, and the Prince of Wales and the Emperor of France and the Sultan of Russia and the rest of those royalties were relations of yours, wouldn't all that royal blood make you _twenty times_ as much of a high-mucky-muck as if you had just _one_ measly little old king for a relation?” The boys had to admit that it would. “You wouldn't call a fellow with all that royal blood in him a _mongrel_, would you?” says Freckles. “You bet your sweet life you wouldn't! A fellow like that is darned near on the level with a congressman or a vicepresident. Whenever he travels around in the old country they turn out the brass band; and the firemen and the Knights of Pythias and the Modern Woodmen parade, and the mayor makes a speech, and there's a picnic and firecrackers, and he gets blamed near anything he wants. People kow-tow to him, just like they do to a swell left-handed pitcher or a champion prizefighter. If you went over to the old country and called a fellow like that a mongrel, and it got out oh you, you would be sent to jail for it.”