Read the excerpt from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, which depicts Alice’s first encounter with the Mouse:

“‘Mine is a long and a sad tale!’ said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing. ‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail; ‘but why do you call it sad?’ And she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking.”

Source: CarrollL, L. Alice’s adventures in wonderland. Penguin Classics. 1988.

From the passage above, we can infer that the author used the figurative language called: