“Maybe there’s a lot of girls that would like me to be king in their hearts.”

“Are there now! Isn’t that lovely. Slice those potatoes as fine as you can, will you, sire?”

* * * * *

He would never have begun the great genealogical research if his father had not twice begged, “Started to look up our ancestors yet?” Suddenly, on a Saturday afternoon when Vestal had the car and was off playing bridge, he determined, “Why not? At least it would be nice, now that I’ll never get much credit in golf or tennis again, if I got to be known as a good historian. Why not?”

He went up to his den, and sat down at his table, a scholar, dedicated and immovable, the vows taken, his lifework clear and vigorously begun, while Vestal and Rod Aldwick and Mr. Prutt and his one-time professor of European History all stood behind him, in awe.

There was one trouble: Now that he had begun his research, just how did you begin a research?

His head slowly turned as he peered speculatively about the room. There seemed to be no very relevant material except Dickens’s A Child’s History of England, a World Almanac, and The Yankee Universal Cyclopedia, in four volumes.

Resolutely he opened the cyclopedia to look up Catherine of Aragon. All that he learned was that she had been married to Henry, had had a daughter but no son, and that it had taken the destruction of the True Church to get rid of her.

–-Well, if she didn’t have a son, then her son could have been our ancestor. No, that doesn’t sound right.

A Child’s History was no more helpful.

What did you do with this research stuff?

Probably, you first wrote and bothered some authority. But which authority? His university history professor had never indicated that he longed for correspondence with tennis players. Was there some fellow in the Government whose job it was to explain how you got historical facts? And who was this writer who knew so much about all kinds of history and wrote these great, big books—five dollars a throw?

How did all these professors chase out and get all this information about some guy who had been dead for a couple hundred years? In the university, he had had no singular respect for professors; they had seemed to him oppressive and full of nasty tricks to catch a fellow who had been out on a bock-beer party last evening.

“Those guys may have it harder than I realized. How do you suppose they decide what Shakespeare meant in some line when chances are he was cockeyed when he wrote it, and didn’t know himself? I probably missed a lot of chances when I was in college. I’ll make up for them now.”

It is to be said for Neil Kingsblood that the hardness of a task did not repel him. Now that he saw the disinterring of his royal ancestors as arduous digging, he really began to work.