Tom Mulligan says yes, that is so; his grand-dad came to this country through getting into some kind of trouble about the King of England, and the King of England ain't anywhere near as swell as the fellow Freckles described, nor near so royal, neither. “Well, then,” says Freckles, “it's the same way with my dog, Spot, here. _Any_ dog can be full of just _one_ kind of thoroughbred blood. That's nothing! But Spot here has got more different kinds of thoroughbred blood in him than any dog you ever saw. By your own say-so he has. He's got _all_ kinds of thoroughbred blood in him. If there's any kind he ain't got, you just name it, will you?” “He ain't got any Great Dane in him,” yells the Stray Boy, hating to knuckle under. “You're a liar, he has, too,” says Freckles. The Stray Boy backed it, and there was a fight. All us dogs and boys gathered around in a ring to watch it, and I was more anxious than anybody else. For the way that fight went, it was easy to see, would decide what I was. Well, Freckles licked that Stray Boy, and rubbed his nose in the mud, and that's how I come to be an aristocrat. Being an aristocrat may sound easy. And it may look easy to outsiders. And it may really be easy for them that are used to it. But it wasn't easy for _me_. It came on me suddenly, the knowledge that I was one, and without warning. I didn't have any time to practise up being one. One minute I wasn't one, and the next minute I was; and while, of course, I felt important over it, there were spells when I would get kind of discouraged, too, and wish I could go back to being a common dog again. I kept expecting my tastes and habits to change. I watched and waited for them to. But they didn't. No change at all set in on me. But I had to pretend I was changed. Then I would get tired of pretending, and be down-hearted about the whole thing, and say to myself: “There has been a mistake. I am _not_ an aristocrat after all.” I might have gone along like that for a long time, partly in joy over my noble birth, and partly in doubt, without ever being certain, if it had not been for a happening which showed, as Freckles said, that blood will tell. It happened the day Wilson's World's Greatest One Ring Circus and Menagerie came to our town. Freckles and me, and all the other dogs and boys, and a good many humans, too, followed the street parade around through town and back to the circus lot. Many went in, and the ones that didn't have any money hung around outside a while and explained to each other they were going at night, because a circus is more fun at night anyhow. Freckles didn't have any money, but his dad was going to take him that night, so when the parade was over, him and me went back to his dad's drug store on Main Street, and I crawled under the soda-water counter to take a nap.