Hippomobile! Read Online Free Page B

wasn’t too bad, neither, we asked, “So what ever happened to this mystery of nature?”
    â€œWhy, it’s still in the old shoe factory down on Hill Street,” 1 Grandpa Homer said.
    â€œIt is?” That news floored us more than the wood planks beneath our feet.
    â€œMaybe we should take ’em there right now, Homer. Whaddaya think of that idea?” asked Grandpa Virgil.
    And we shouted, “Take us, take us!”
    And so it was settled.
    We’d never been all the way to Hill Street before, and so walking all the way down there, as Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil were proposing, was a right big adventure for us, and we were as excited as jumping beans. But we’d hardly even gotten off the square when Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil started in with their singing.
    Now, don’t mistake us; we enjoy a lot of them songs of theirs. Even back then, we knew several by heart and were glad to sing right along with them. But the song they picked for our hike down to Hill Street was so full of “sweethearts” and soft words and sentimental thoughts that we almost wished we hadn’t said we wanted to see the hippomobile in the first place. And here’s just two lines from that song so you know we ain’t exaggerating none:
    Â 
Let me call you “Sweetheart,” I’m in love with you
.
Let me hear you whisper that you love me too
.
    Â 
    And the worse thing about it was that them lines were the refrain part of the song that they came back to over and over again like a dog to its dish. But we just stuck our fingers in our ears and hiked on like troupers. Soon, though, we turned a corner, and that lifted our spirits. We looked up at the rusty street sign hanging there crooked and read HILL STREET on it and knew we couldn’t be far off now. And smack-dab there at the end of the street was an old brick building sitting there all by itself and surrounded by nothing but weeds.
    We took off running and had time to inspect it before our grandpas got there. It was all closed up tighter than a secret, and the windows were too high to look through even when we jumped. We soon found a loose brick no higher than our chins on the side of the building. We tried to pull it out, and when that didn’t work, we got a stick and shoved it in and heard the brick hit the ground on the other side. We peeked in, kinda like looking through a hole in a circus tent, but we didn’t see no trapeze and no elephants, neither. In fact, it was too dark in there to see anything at all.
    â€œWell, you two coming or ain’t ya?” Grandpa Homer asked. We jumped out of our skin because there he was, standing right behind us.
    We followed him around front, and there was Grandpa Virgil waiting with a giant key that looked to us more like a knucklebone. But he used it to unlock the door, and when he did, the door squeaked louder than a fiddle.
    We let our grandpas go in first because it was mighty dark and cobwebby, and there was no telling what was lurking in there. We kept awful close to the doorway, at least until our eyes adjusted so we could see better. And once they did, we still didn’t see no trapeze and elephants. But we saw something, all right. It was big and black and huge and went almost all the way up to the ceiling. It didn’t remind us of anything we’d ever seen before, and we’ll admit that we took a step closer to each other.
    But it didn’t seem to bother Grandpa Homer none. He went right up to it and took hold of a piece of it. Then he tossed it at us, and we caught it before we even had a chance to scream and jump out of the way. And it’s a good thing we didn’t scream and jump, because alls it was, was a shoe.
    â€œThat’s one of them Gottfrieds we was telling you about,” Grandpa Homer said.
    â€œThem are all the shoes he never sold,” Grandpa Virgil said. “Poor feller.”
    There were hundreds of them, too.