← ", and the pigs had great difficulty in making them see that this was contrary to the spirit of Animalism. 🔊
← Their most faithful disciples were the two cart−horses, Boxer and Clover. These two had great difficulty in thinking anything out for themselves, but having once accepted the pigs as their teachers, they absorbed everything that they were told, and passed it on to the other animals by simple arguments. 🔊
← Yes, it was theirs−everything that they could see was theirs! In the ecstasy of that thought they gambolled round and round, they hurled themselves into the air in great leaps of excitement. 🔊
← Sometimes the work was hard; the implements had been designed for human beings and not for animals, and it was a great drawback that no animal was able to use any tool that involved standing on his hind legs. 🔊
← The reading and writing classes, however, were a great success. By the autumn almost every animal on the farm was literate in some degree. 🔊
← Napoleon, on the other hand, argued that the great need of the moment was to increase food production, and that if they wasted time on the windmill they would all starve to death. 🔊
← The advantage of only having to feed themselves, and not having to support five extravagant human beings as well, was so great that it would have taken a lot of failures to outweigh it. 🔊
← Then it was discovered that the greater part of the potato crop had been frosted in the clamps, which had not been covered thickly enough. 🔊
← Boxer saw them coming and put out his great hoof, caught a dog in mid−air, and pinned him to the ground. 🔊
← But for the first time it occurred to him that he was eleven years old and that perhaps his great muscles were not quite what they had once been. 🔊
← But when the animals saw the green flag flying, and heard the gun firing again−seven times it was fired in all−and heard the speech that Napoleon made, congratulating them on their conduct, it did seem to them after all that they had won a great victory. 🔊
← In the evenings he would admit privately to Clover that the hoof troubled him a great deal. 🔊
← But if there were hardships to be borne, they were partly offset by the fact that life nowadays had a greater dignity than it had had before. 🔊
← The sheep were the greatest devotees of the Spontaneous Demonstration, and if anyone complained (as a few animals sometimes did, when no pigs or dogs were near) that they wasted time and meant a lot of standing about in the cold, the sheep were sure to silence him with a tremendous bleating of "Four legs good, two legs bad!" 🔊
← It was only his appearance that was a little altered; his hide was less shiny than it had used to be, and his great haunches seemed to have shrunken. 🔊
← There were many more creatures on the farm now, though the increase was not so great as had been expected in earlier years. 🔊
← And when they heard the gun booming and saw the green flag fluttering at the masthead, their hearts swelled with imperishable pride, and the talk turned always towards the old heroic days, the expulsion of Jones, the writing of the Seven Commandments, the great battles in which the human invaders had been defeated. 🔊
← Squealer was with them for the greater part of every day. He was, he said, teaching them to sing a new song, for which privacy was needed. 🔊
← A deputation of neighbouring farmers had been invited to make a tour of inspection. They were shown all over the farm, and expressed great admiration for everything they saw, especially the windmill. 🔊
← It was a source of great satisfaction to him, he said−and, he was sure, to all others present−to feel that a long period of mistrust and misunderstanding had now come to an end. 🔊