Many Golden Minutes (Metaphor)
After gaining access to the lumber room, Nicholas spends "many golden minutes" marveling at the tapestry he finds there. In this metaphor, Saki emphasizes the preciousness, brilliance, and rarity of the time Nicholas gets to spend with the tapestry by attributing to those minutes the quality of gold.
In a Tight Corner (Metaphor)
While looking at the story depicted by the tapestry in the lumber room, Nicholas considers how the huntsman is oblivious to the wolf pack hastening toward him from the woods. He speculates on whether the huntsman will have enough arrows to kill the wolves before they attack him and his dogs. In the end, Nicholas concludes that the huntsman and his dogs are "in a tight corner." In this metaphor, Saki uses a figure of speech to illustrate the difficulty in which the huntsman finds himself. With approaching wolves and few arrows, it is as if the wolves back the huntsman into a corner from which he has few possibilities of escape.
An Unknown Land (Metaphor)
While his aunt is distracted keeping watch in the garden, Nicholas takes down the lumber-room key and turns it in the lock. Saki writes: "The door opened, and Nicholas was in an unknown land." In the metaphor "unknown land," Saki emphasizes both Nicholas's unfamiliarity with the lumber room and the imaginative potential of what it contains by likening entrance to the room to suddenly stepping into another country or territory altogether. In reality, he has only opened the door to a storeroom within his house, but to Nicholas, it feels as though he has been transported to a marvelous foreign place.
