← And then, after a few preliminary tries, the whole farm burst out into Beasts of England in tremendous unison. 🔊
← After only a moment or two they gave up trying to defend themselves and took to their heels. 🔊
← Clover learnt the whole alphabet, but could not put words together. Boxer could not get beyond the letter D. He would trace out A, B, C, D, in the dust with his great hoof, and then would stand staring at the letters with his ears back, sometimes shaking his forelock, trying with all his might to remember what came next and never succeeding. 🔊
← At the sight, several men dropped their sticks and tried to run. Panic overtook them, and the next moment all the animals together were chasing them round and round the yard. 🔊
← All the men were gone except one. Back in the yard Boxer was pawing with his hoof at the stable−lad who lay face down in the mud, trying to turn him over. 🔊
← He set his ears back, shook his forelock several times, and tried hard to marshal his thoughts; but in the end he could not think of anything to say. 🔊
← Boxer passed it off as usual with "Napoleon is always right!", but Clover, who thought she remembered a definite ruling against beds, went to the end of the barn and tried to puzzle out the Seven Commandments which were inscribed there. 🔊
← "That was our mistake, comrade. For we know now−it is all written down in the secret documents that we have found−that in reality he was trying to lure us to our doom." 🔊
← The van began to gather speed. Clover tried to stir her stout limbs to a gallop, and achieved a canter. 🔊
← He was trying to kick his way out. The time had been when a few kicks from Boxer's hoofs would have smashed the van to matchwood. 🔊
← 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. 🔊