Animal Farm Vocab

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.

Today we begin the hay harvest.

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 early apples were now ripening, and the grass of the orchard was littered with windfalls.

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.

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.

After much thought Snowball declared that the Seven Commandments could in effect be reduced to a single maxim, namely: "Four legs good, two legs bad."

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

Nevertheless, without openly admitting it, he was devoted to Boxer; the two of them usually spent their Sundays together in the small paddock beyond the orchard, grazing side by side and never speaking.

And so within five minutes of their invasion they were in ignominious retreat by the same way as they had come, with a flock of geese hissing after them and pecking at their calves all the way.

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.

First came the hoisting of the flag.

He ordered the hens' rations to be stopped, and decreed that any animal giving so much as a grain of corn to a hen should be punished by death.

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

(How these were to be procured, Snowball did not say.)

The words ran: Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken to my joyful tidings Of the golden future time.

It happened that Jessie and Bluebell had both whelped soon after the hay harvest, giving birth between them to nine sturdy puppies.

At the last moment Mollie, the foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr. Jones's trap, came mincing daintily in, chewing at a lump of sugar.