Hello Class! Daniel here with Sound of Hope Radio back for another episode of Animal Farm English...I hope you are doing well....Let’s get straight to our story, as nothing special has happened on my end these past few days...When we left off, old Boxer had been taken away to the dreadful Knackers....Animal Farm continued...

Here Squealers demeanor changed a bit and his little eyes darted suspicious glances from side to side before he proceeded.

It had come to his knowledge, he said, that a foolish and wicked rumour
had been circulated at the time of Boxer's removal. Some of the animals
had noticed that the van which took Boxer away was marked "Horse
Slaughterer," and had actually jumped to the conclusion that Boxer was
being sent to the knacker's. It was almost unbelievable, said Squealer,
that any animal could be so stupid. Surely, he cried indignantly, whisking
his tail and skipping from side to side, surely they knew their beloved
Leader, Comrade Napoleon, better than that? But the explanation was really
very simple. The van had previously been the property of the knacker, and
had been bought by the veterinary surgeon, who had not yet painted the old
name out. That was how the mistake had arisen.

The animals were enormously relieved to hear this. And when Squealer went
on to give further graphic details of Boxer's death-bed, the admirable
care he had received, and the expensive medicines for which Napoleon had
paid without a thought as to the cost, their last doubts disappeared and
the sorrow that they felt for their comrade's death was tempered by the
thought that at least he had died happy.

Napoleon himself appeared at the meeting on the following Sunday morning
and pronounced a short oration in Boxer's honour. It had not been
possible, he said, to bring back their lamented comrade's remains for
interment on the farm, but he had ordered a large wreath to be made from
the laurels in the farmhouse garden and sent down to be placed on Boxer's
grave. And in a few days' time the pigs intended to hold a memorial
banquet in Boxer's honour. Napoleon ended his speech with a reminder of
Boxer's two favourite maxims, "I will work harder" and "Comrade Napoleon
is always right"--maxims, he said, which every animal would do well to
adopt as his own.

On the day appointed for the banquet, a grocer's van drove up from
Willingdon and delivered a large wooden crate at the farmhouse. That night
there was the sound of uproarious singing, which was followed by what
sounded like a violent quarrel and ended at about eleven o'clock with a
tremendous crash of glass. No one stirred in the farmhouse before noon on
the following day, and the word went round that from somewhere or other
the pigs had acquired the money to buy themselves another case of whisky.

Chapter X

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.

Muriel was dead; Bluebell, Jessie, and Pincher were dead. Jones too was
dead--he had died in an inebriates' home in another part of the country.
Snowball was forgotten. Boxer was forgotten, except by the few who had
known him. Clover was an old stout mare now, stiff in the joints and with
a tendency to rheumy eyes. She was two years past the retiring age, but in
fact no animal had ever actually retired. The talk of setting aside a
corner of the pasture for superannuated animals had long since been
dropped. Napoleon was now a mature boar of twenty-four stone. Squealer was
so fat that he could with difficulty see out of his eyes. Only old
Benjamin was much the same as ever, except for being a little greyer about
the muzzle, and, since Boxer's death, more morose and taciturn than ever.

There were many more creatures on the farm now, though the increase was
not so great as had been expected in earlier years. Many animals had been
born to whom the Rebellion was only a dim tradition, passed on by word of
mouth, and others had been bought who had never heard mention of such a
thing before their arrival. The farm possessed three horses now besides
Clover. They were fine upstanding beasts, willing workers and good
comrades, but very stupid. None of them proved able to learn the alphabet
beyond the letter B. They accepted everything that they were told about
the Rebellion and the principles of Animalism, especially from Clover, for
whom they had an almost filial respect; but it was doubtful whether they
understood very much of it.

The farm was more prosperous now, and better organised: it had even been
enlarged by two fields which had been bought from Mr. Pilkington. The
windmill had been successfully completed at last, and the farm possessed a
threshing machine and a hay elevator of its own, and various new buildings
had been added to it. Whymper had bought himself a dogcart. The windmill,
however, had not after all been used for generating electrical power. It
was used for milling corn, and brought in a handsome money profit. The
animals were hard at work building yet another windmill; when that one was
finished, so it was said, the dynamos would be installed. But the luxuries
of which Snowball had once taught the animals to dream, the stalls with
electric light and hot and cold water, and the three-day week, were no
longer talked about. Napoleon had denounced such ideas as contrary to the
spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard
and living frugally.

Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the
animals themselves any richer-except, of course, for the pigs and the
dogs. Perhaps this was partly because there were so many pigs and so many
dogs. It was not that these creatures did not work, after their fashion.
There was, as Squealer was never tired of explaining, endless work in the
supervision and organisation of the farm. Much of this work was of a kind
that the other animals were too ignorant to understand. For example,
Squealer told them that the pigs had to expend enormous labours every day
upon mysterious things called "files," "reports," "minutes," and
"memoranda". These were large sheets of paper which had to be closely
covered with writing, and as soon as they were so covered, they were burnt
in the furnace. This was of the highest importance for the welfare of the
farm, Squealer said. But still, neither pigs nor dogs produced any food by
their own labour; and there were very many of them, and their appetites
were always good.

As for the others, their life, so far as they knew, was as it had always
been. They were generally hungry, they slept on straw, they drank from the
pool, they laboured in the fields; in winter they were troubled by the
cold, and in summer by the flies. 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. They could not remember. There was nothing
with which they could compare their present lives: they had nothing to go
upon except Squealer's lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated
that everything was getting better and better. The animals found the
problem insoluble; in any case, they had little time for speculating on
such things now. Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of
his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be
much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so
he said, the unalterable law of life.

And yet the animals never gave up hope. More, they never lost, even for an
instant, their sense of honour and privilege in being members of Animal
Farm. They were still the only farm in the whole county--in all
England!--owned and operated by animals. Not one of them, not even the
youngest, not even the newcomers who had been brought from farms ten or
twenty miles away, ever ceased to marvel at that. 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. None of the old dreams had been abandoned. The Republic of the
Animals which Major had foretold, when the green fields of England should
be untrodden by human feet, was still believed in. Some day it was coming:
it might not be soon, it might not be with in the lifetime of any animal
now living, but still it was coming. Even the tune of 'Beasts of England'
was perhaps hummed secretly here and there: at any rate, it was a fact
that every animal on the farm knew it, though no one would have dared to
sing it aloud. It might be that their lives were hard and that not all of
their hopes had been fulfilled; but they were conscious that they were not
as other animals. If they went hungry, it was not from feeding tyrannical
human beings; if they worked hard, at least they worked for themselves.
No creature among them went upon two legs. No creature called any other
creature "Master." All animals were equal.

One day in early summer Squealer ordered the sheep to follow him, and led
them out to a piece of waste ground at the other end of the farm, which
had become overgrown with birch saplings. The sheep spent the whole day
there browsing at the leaves under Squealer's supervision. In the evening
he returned to the farmhouse himself, but, as it was warm weather, told
the sheep to stay where they were. It ended by their remaining there for a
whole week, during which time the other animals saw nothing of them.
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.

It was just after the sheep had returned, on a pleasant evening when the
animals had finished work and were making their way back to the farm
buildings, that the terrified neighing of a horse sounded from the yard.
Startled, the animals stopped in their tracks. It was Clover's voice. She
neighed again, and all the animals broke into a gallop and rushed into the
yard. Then they saw what Clover had seen.

It was a pig walking on his hind legs.

Yes, it was Squealer. A little awkwardly, as though not quite used to
supporting his considerable bulk in that position, but with perfect
balance, he was strolling across the yard. And a moment later, out from
the door of the farmhouse came a long file of pigs, all walking on their
hind legs. Some did it better than others, one or two were even a trifle
unsteady and looked as though they would have liked the support of a
stick, but every one of them made his way right round the yard
successfully. And finally there was a tremendous baying of dogs and a
shrill crowing from the black cockerel, and out came Napoleon himself,
majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with
his dogs gambolling round him.

He carried a whip in his trotter.

There was a deadly silence. Amazed, terrified, huddling together, the
animals watched the long line of pigs march slowly round the yard. It was
as though the world had turned upside-down. Then there came a moment when
the first shock had worn off and when, in spite of everything-in spite of
their terror of the dogs, and of the habit, developed through long years,
of never complaining, never criticising, no matter what happened--they
might have uttered some word of protest. But just at that moment, as
though at a signal, all the sheep burst out into a tremendous bleating of--

"Four legs good, two legs BETTER! Four legs good, two legs BETTER! Four
legs good, two legs BETTER!"

And now for some phrases…

1. Long time, no see. Where have you been!? We use this informal phrase to emphasize that we haven’t seen somebody for a long time.
2. Up to no good. When we say somebody is up to no good, it means they are doing something which we don’t like and dissaprove of.

OK Folks, Well thats all this week…Take care and we’ll see you next week. This is Daniel for Sound of Hope Radio…Over and out…