← For whole days at a time he would lounge in his Windsor chair in the kitchen, reading the newspapers, drinking, and occasionally feeding Moses on crusts of bread soaked in beer. 🔊
← The pigs now revealed that during the past three months they had taught themselves to read and write from an old spelling book which had belonged to Mr. Jones's children and which had been thrown on the rubbish heap. 🔊
← The Commandments were written on the tarred wall in great white letters that could be read thirty yards away. 🔊
← Snowball read it aloud for the benefit of the others. All the animals nodded in complete agreement, and the cleverer ones at once began to learn the Commandments by heart. 🔊
← He was indefatigable at this. He formed the Egg Production Committee for the hens, the Clean Tails League for the cows, the Wild Comrades' Re−education Committee (the object of this was to tame the rats and rabbits), the Whiter Wool Movement for the sheep, and various others, besides instituting classes in reading and writing. 🔊
← The reading and writing classes, however, were a great success. By the autumn almost every animal on the farm was literate in some degree. 🔊
← As for the pigs, they could already read and write perfectly. The dogs learned to read fairly well, but were not interested in reading anything except the Seven Commandments. 🔊
← Muriel, the goat, could read somewhat better than the dogs, and sometimes used to read to the others in the evenings from scraps of newspaper which she found on the rubbish heap. 🔊
← Benjamin could read as well as any pig, but never exercised his faculty. So far as he knew, he said, there was nothing worth reading. 🔊
← The animals had never heard of anything of this kind before (for the farm was an old−fashioned one and had only the most primitive machinery), and they listened in astonishment while Snowball conjured up pictures of fantastic machines which would do their work for them while they grazed at their ease in the fields or improved their minds with reading and conversation. 🔊
← Napoleon read out the orders for the week in a gruff soldierly style, and after a single singing of Beasts of England, all the animals dispersed. 🔊
← cried Squealer. "Jones's shot only grazed him. I could show you this in his own writing, if you were able to read it. 🔊
← Clover asked Benjamin to read her the Sixth Commandment, and when Benjamin, as usual, said that he refused to meddle in such matters, she fetched Muriel. 🔊
← Muriel read the Commandment for her. It ran: "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause." 🔊
← On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred per cent, three hundred per cent, or five hundred per cent, as the case might be. 🔊
← But a few days later Muriel, reading over the Seven Commandments to herself, noticed that there was yet another of them which the animals had remembered wrong. 🔊
← Actually the Commandment read: "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess." 🔊
← Reading out the figures in a shrill, rapid voice, he proved to them in detail that they had more oats, more hay, more turnips than they had had in Jones's day, that they worked shorter hours, that their drinking water was of better quality, that they lived longer, that a larger proportion of their young ones survived infancy, and that they had more straw in their stalls and suffered less from fleas. 🔊
← "My sight is failing," she said finally. "Even when I was young I could not have read what was written there. 🔊
← For once Benjamin consented to break his rule, and he read out to her what was written on the wall. 🔊