← MR. JONES, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen−houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes. 🔊
← Word had gone round during the day that old Major, the prize Middle White boar, had had a strange dream on the previous night and wished to communicate it to the other animals. 🔊
← When Major saw that they had all made themselves comfortable and were waiting attentively, he cleared his throat and began: "Comrades, you have heard already about the strange dream that I had last night. 🔊
← All animals are equal. "And now, comrades, I will tell you about my dream of last night. 🔊
← Last night, however, it came back to me in my dream. And what is more, the words of the song also came back−words, I am certain, which were sung by the animals of long ago and have been lost to memory for generations. 🔊
← They were so delighted with the song that they sang it right through five times in succession, and might have continued singing it all night if they had not been interrupted. 🔊
← Several nights a week, after Mr. Jones was asleep, they held secret meetings in the barn and expounded the principles of Animalism to the others. 🔊
← Then they sang Beasts of England from end to end seven times running, and after that they settled down for the night and slept as they had never slept before. 🔊
← From morning to night he was pushing and pulling, always at the spot where the work was hardest. 🔊
← Boxer would even come out at nights and work for an hour or two on his own by the light of the harvest moon. 🔊
← Do you know the enemy who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? 🔊
← The animals were so disturbed that they could hardly sleep in their stalls. Every night, it was said, he came creeping in under cover of darkness and performed all kinds of mischief. 🔊
← Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball. If a window was broken or a drain was blocked up, someone was certain to say that Snowball had come in the night and done it, and when the key of the store−shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. 🔊
← They, too, were slaughtered. Then a goose came forward and confessed to having secreted six ears of corn during the last year's harvest and eaten them in the night. 🔊
← Having got there, he collected two successive loads of stone and dragged them down to the windmill before retiring for the night. 🔊
← These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. 🔊
← If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak, as she had protected the lost brood of ducklings with her foreleg on the night of Major's speech. 🔊
← It had been overlooked at the time when the house was first occupied. That night there came from the farmhouse the sound of loud singing, in which, to everyone's surprise, the strains of Beasts of England were mixed up. 🔊
← One night at about twelve o'clock there was a loud crash in the yard, and the animals rushed out of their stalls. 🔊
← It was a moonlit night. At the foot of the end wall of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written, there lay a ladder broken in two pieces. 🔊