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.