When introducing readers to the character of Sylvia, the narrator uses two hyperboles, as seen in the following passage:
There never was such a child for straying about out-of-doors since the world was made! It was a good change for a little maid who had tried to grow for eight years in a crowded manufacturing town […] it seemed as if she never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm.
The first hyperbole the narrator employs here—“there was never such a child for straying about out-of-doors since the world was made!”—is clearly an exaggeration. The hyperbolic language effectively communicates just how free Sylvia feels after she moves from the city to the country to live with her grandmother. This statement helps readers to understand Sylvia’s love of nature and the outdoors.
The second hyperbole—“it seemed as if she never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm”—is also an obvious overstatement. Like the first hyperbole, this one helps readers to understand just how connected to the farm and the woods Sylvia has become in so short a time. All of this hyperbolic language, early on in the story, prepares readers for Sylvia’s choice to ally herself with nature (via the heron) rather than with cities and industrialization (via the hunter).
