Book excerpt: Grammardog Teacher's Guide contains 16 quizzes for this novel. All sentences are from the novel. Figurative language is characteristic of Realism ("The coins he earned afterwards seemed as irrelevant as stones brought to complete a house suddenly buried by an earthquake." "He seemed to weave like the spider from pure impulse without reflection." "The thoughts were stranger to him now like old friendships impossible to revive." "The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom . . .").