When the narrator is looking around Henry’s cottage after being invited in, he notices a photograph of Henry’s wife. He uses a pair of hyperboles and a metaphor to capture his and Henry’s experience while looking at the photo:
I went to the little black-walnut bracket on the farther wall, and did find there what I had not yet noticed—a daguerreotype-case. It contained the sweetest girlish face, and the most beautiful, as it seemed to me, that I had ever seen. The man drank the admiration from my face, and was fully satisfied.
The hyperboles here—in which the narrator describes Henry’s wife as being “the most beautiful” woman he “had ever seen” and having “the sweetest girlish face”—are exaggerations meant to capture the narrator’s appreciation of the young women’s beauty. The narrator’s extreme attraction to Henry’s wife explains why he decides to stay and wait for her arrival, in spite of Henry’s odd behavior and his wife’s continued delays in arrival.
In the final sentence, the narrator describes how Henry “drank the admiration from [the narrator’s] face,” metaphorically comparing his admiration for Henry’s wife to a beverage that Henry can consume. This moment is significant as it is the first sign that there is something strange about Henry, especially in relation to his wife. As the narrator learns at the close of the story, Henry’s wife disappeared 19 years ago and he hasn’t seen her since, though he continues to worship her and talk about her as if she were still alive.
As the narrator sets the scene at the beginning of the story, he describes the desolate conditions of California mining communities in the decades after the Gold Rush, using a hyperbole in the process:
Round about California in that day were scattered a host of these living dead men—pride-smitten poor fellows, grizzled and old at forty, whose secret thoughts were made all of regrets and longings—regrets for their wasted lives, and longings to be out of the struggle and done with it all.
When the narrator describes the “living dead men” who were left after most prospectors fled the region, he is using hyperbolic language in order to communicate just how weary and worn-down these remaining men were. As he goes on to state, the men were “grizzled and old at forty,” full of “regrets for their wasted lives” and “longings to be out of the struggle.”
This is one of the many moments in which Twain—who had personal experience in mining communities—highlights the brutal realities of the aftermath of the Gold Rush, challenging the rosy and idealistic portrayals of miners eagerly and easily striking gold. In reality, the people left behind were like “the living dead” haunting what appropriately came to be known as "ghost towns."
