← This was early in March. During the next three months there was much secret activity. 🔊
← Now, as it turned out, the Rebellion was achieved much earlier and more easily than anyone had expected. 🔊
← The men had milked the cows in the early morning and then had gone out rabbiting, without bothering to feed the animals. 🔊
← He had made an arrangement with one of the cockerels to call him in the mornings half an hour earlier than anyone else, and would put in some volunteer labour at whatever seemed to be most needed, before the regular day's work began. 🔊
← Nobody shirked−or almost nobody. Mollie, it was true, was not good at getting up in the mornings, and had a way of leaving work early on the ground that there was a stone in her hoof. 🔊
← The early apples were now ripening, and the grass of the orchard was littered with windfalls. 🔊
← Early in October, when the corn was cut and stacked and some of it was already threshed, a flight of pigeons came whirling through the air and alighted in the yard of Animal Farm in the wildest excitement. 🔊
← Even so, it was found necessary to leave certain tasks undone. The harvest was a little less successful than in the previous year, and two fields which should have been sown with roots in the early summer were not sown because the ploughing had not been completed early enough. 🔊
← He had made arrangements with the cockerel to call him three−quarters of an hour earlier in the mornings instead of half an hour. 🔊
← Once again the animals were conscious of a vague uneasiness. Never to have any dealings with human beings, never to engage in trade, never to make use of money−had not these been among the earliest resolutions passed at that first triumphant Meeting after Jones was expelled? 🔊
← Every Monday Mr. Whymper visited the farm as had been arranged. He was a sly−looking little man with side whiskers, a solicitor in a very small way of business, but sharp enough to have realised earlier than anyone else that Animal Farm would need a broker and that the commissions would be worth having. 🔊
← Again the animals seemed to remember that a resolution against this had been passed in the early days, and again Squealer was able to convince them that this was not the case. 🔊
← When the hens heard this, they raised a terrible outcry. They had been warned earlier that this sacrifice might be necessary, but had not believed that it would really happen. 🔊
← 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. 🔊
← Suddenly, early in the spring, an alarming thing was discovered. Snowball was secretly frequenting the farm by night! 🔊
← From now onwards I shall get up a full hour earlier in the mornings." And he moved off at his lumbering trot and made for the quarry. 🔊
← The fear and despair they had felt a moment earlier were drowned in their rage against this vile, contemptible act. 🔊
← There were many more creatures on the farm now, though the increase was not so great as had been expected in earlier years. 🔊
← Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, when Jones's expulsion was still recent, things had been better or worse than now. 🔊
← One day in early summer Squealer ordered the sheep to follow him, and led them out to a piece of waste ground at the other end of the farm, which had become overgrown with birch saplings. 🔊