When capturing Nicholas’s experience of the lumber room—and the tapestry he finds therein—the narrator uses a pair of hyperboles, as seen in the following passage:
[I]t was a storehouse of unimagined treasures. The aunt-by-assertion was one of those people who think that things spoil by use and consign them to dust and damp by way of preserving them. Such parts of the house as Nicholas knew best were rather bare and cheerless, but here there were wonderful things for the eye to feast on. First and foremost there was a piece of framed tapestry that was evidently meant to be a fire-screen. To Nicholas it was a living, breathing story.
The first hyperbole here is the description of the lumber room as “a storehouse of unimagined treasures.” Because the room contains fairly commonplace objects such as fire screens, candlesticks, and teapots, the narrator’s language here is clearly intentionally exaggerated in order to capture the experience of a sheltered young boy seeing intricate versions of these objects for the first time. While he experiences them as “wonderful things for the eye to feast on,” it’s likely that an older or worldlier person would look upon them as kitschy or mundane.
The description of the tapestry as “a living, breathing story” is also an example of hyperbolic language. This exaggeration communicates just how emotionally affected Nicholas is by the tapestry (which contains a depiction of a hunting scene). It is likely that Nicholas’s sense of imagination is activated while witnessing this visual piece of art, and this informs his experience of it as something more than an inanimate object.
In an example of hyperbole, the narrator describes the gooseberry garden as a “forbidden paradise":
The aunt had many other things to do that afternoon, but she spent an hour or two in trivial gardening operations among flower beds and shrubberies, whence she could keep a watchful eye on the two doors that led to the forbidden paradise.
At this point in the story, Nicholas’s aunt is “keep[ing] a watchful eye” on the entrance to the gooseberry garden to ensure that he does not enter it, thereby breaking the rule she set for him. The narrator’s description of the garden as a “forbidden paradise” is a hyperbole in that it is an example of intentionally exaggerated language—this small suburban garden guarded by an aging woman is clearly far from a “forbidden paradise.”
Saki uses hyperbolic language here in order to highlight the aunt’s inflated sense of power. While she feels that she is keeping Nicholas from the “paradise” of his dreams, she has actually completely misread the situation—Nicholas’s true “paradise” is the lumber room, which he is happily exploring while his aunt is on guard duty in the garden. This moment also highlights how, despite being much younger in age, Nicholas is the one who holds the power in their relationship.
