se, but when Tip saw that Top was friendly with the
children, Tip was joyful also.

I call the black dogs Tip and Top, for they were really the missing
poodles, and I will explain how it was their color was changed.

No sooner did Ted and Janet call the black poodles to them than Professor
Montelli grew very angry indeed. He jumped down off the platform, and,
going to where the Curlytops stood at their seats, with the dogs frisking
around them, the trainer cried:

"Here! What do you mean by calling my dogs away when I am making them do
tricks? What do you children mean?"

"These aren't your dogs--they're _ours_!" declared Ted.

"Yours! Nonsense!" blustered the trainer. "These are my dogs. I have had
them a long while!"

"Not both of them!" said Janet, who remembered what the man had said.
"You told us you hadn't had Emperor very long."

"Well, I have the other! They are both my dogs!" cried the angry man. "If
you have lost any dogs you had better look somewhere for them. Get out of
my tent and give me back the poodles!"

He made a move to thrust Ted and Janet to one side and pick up the
poodles, but a man in the audience said:

"Not so fast, Professor. It seems to me that by the way these dogs came
to this girl and boy when called that there may be something in their
claim. Did you lose two dogs?" he asked Ted and Janet.

"Yes, sir," they answered. And then Ted told how Tip was taken out of
their automobile some weeks before, while Top was stolen from their barn
a night or two previous.

"Nonsense! As if I had their dogs!" sneered the trainer. "What kind of
poodles did you lose, as you say?" he asked.

"Just exactly the same kind as these, and they did the same tricks," Ted
answered. "We can make these do the same tricks you did, and some more,
too," he added.

"I don't believe it!" growled the trainer.

"Let's show 'em, Ted!" cried Janet.

And then and there, down on the ground in the tent, while the crowd
looked on, the Curlytops put the two black poodles through the tricks Tip
and Top used to do.

"It begins to look as though there was something in their claim," said
the man who had acted as the friend of Ted and Janet.

"Those are my dogs!" declared the Professor, getting more and more angry.
"Tell me--what color were the poodles you had?" he asked Janet and Ted.

"Well," Ted answered slowly, "Tip and Top were white, except Tip had a
little black spot on the end of his tail, and Top had a black