Animal Farm

These Seven Commandments would now be inscribed on the wall; they would form an unalterable law by which all the animals on Animal Farm must live for ever after.

In return for your four confinements and all your labour in the fields, what have you ever had except your bare rations and a stall?

At one end of the big barn, on a sort of raised platform, Major was already ensconced on his bed of straw, under a lantern which hung from a beam.

A little way down the pasture there was a knoll that commanded a view of most of the farm.

There was a good quarry of limestone on the farm, and plenty of sand and cement had been found in one of the outhouses, so that all the materials for building were at hand.

They met with many difficulties--for instance, later in the year, when they harvested the corn, they had to tread it out in the ancient style and blow away the chaff with their breath, since the farm possessed no threshing machine--but the pigs wit

In the ecstasy of that thought they gambolled round and round, they hurled themselves into the air in great leaps of excitement.

The cows lowed it, the dogs whined it, the sheep bleated it, the horses whinnied it, the ducks quacked it.

Now that the small field beyond the orchard had been set aside for barley, it was rumoured that a corner of the large pasture was to be fenced off and turned into a grazing-ground for superannuated animals.

None of you has ever seen a dead donkey," and the others had to be content with this cryptic answer.

Huge boulders, far too big to be used as they were, were lying all over the bed of the quarry.

It happened that there was in the yard a pile of timber which had been stacked there ten years earlier when a beech spinney was cleared.

By late summer a sufficient store of stone had accumulated, and then the building began, under the superintendence of the pigs.

feed as in a meadow or pasture

These Seven Commandments would now be inscribed on the wall; they would form an unalterable law by which all the animals on Animal Farm must live for ever after.

He lay down, tucked his fore hoofs beneath him, shut his eyes, and with a hard effort managed to formulate his thoughts.

The skull of old Major, now clean of flesh, had been disinterred from the orchard and set up on a stump at the foot of the flagstaff, beside the gun.

And the news soon leaked out that every pig was now receiving a ration of a pint of beer daily, with half a gallon for Napoleon himself, which was always served to him in the Crown Derby soup tureen.

Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

First came the hoisting of the flag.

All the animals were now present except Moses, the tame raven, who slept on a perch behind the back door.

For that day we all must labour, Though we die before it break; Cows and horses, geese and turkeys, All must toil for freedom's sake.