← No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. 🔊
← Each was sold at a year old−you will never see one of them again. 🔊
← But it reminded me of something that I had long forgotten. Many years ago, when I was a little pig, my mother and the other sows used to sing an old song of which they knew only the tune and the first three words. 🔊
← It was decided to set the gun up at the foot of the Flagstaff, like a piece of artillery, and to fire it twice a year−once on October the twelfth, the anniversary of the Battle of the Cowshed, and once on Midsummer Day, the anniversary of the Rebellion. 🔊
← (How these were to be procured, Snowball did not say.) But he maintained that it could all be done in a year. 🔊
← The building of the windmill, with various other improvements, was expected to take two years. 🔊
← ALL that year the animals worked like slaves. But they were happy in their work; they grudged no effort or sacrifice, well aware that everything that they did was for the benefit of themselves and those of their kind who would come after them, and not for a pack of idle, thieving human beings. 🔊
← The needs of the windmill must override everything else, he said. He was therefore making arrangements to sell a stack of hay and part of the current year's wheat crop, and later on, if more money were needed, it would have to be made up by the sale of eggs, for which there was always a market in Willingdon. 🔊
← By the autumn the animals were tired but happy. They had had a hard year, and after the sale of part of the hay and corn, the stores of food for the winter were none too plentiful, but the windmill compensated for everything. 🔊
← They added that Snowball had privately admitted to them that he had been Jones's secret agent for years past. 🔊
← As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. 🔊
← Throughout the year the animals worked even harder than they had worked in the previous year. 🔊
← It was also announced that the gun would be fired every year on Napoleon's birthday, as well as on the other two anniversaries. 🔊
← All these rumours had probably originated with Snowball and his agents. It now appeared that Snowball was not, after all, hiding on Pinchfield Farm, and in fact had never been there in his life: he was living−in considerable luxury, so it was said−at Foxwood, and had in reality been a pensioner of Pilkington for years past. 🔊
← "But they have destroyed the windmill. And we had worked on it for two years!" 🔊
← 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. 🔊
← The farm had had a fairly successful year, but was still short of money. There were the bricks, sand, and lime for the schoolroom to be purchased, and it would also be necessary to begin saving up again for the machinery for the windmill. 🔊
← Boxer professed not to be sorry for what had happened. If he made a good recovery, he might expect to live another three years, and he looked forward to the peaceful days that he would spend in the corner of the big pasture. 🔊
← YEARS passed. The seasons came and went, the short animal lives fled by. A time came when there was no one who remembered the old days before the Rebellion, except Clover, Benjamin, Moses the raven, and a number of the pigs. 🔊
← There were many more creatures on the farm now, though the increase was not so great as had been expected in earlier years. 🔊