Read these lines: "Then there was a wild yelp of agony and the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the yelps continued, and so did the dog; he crossed the house in front of the altar; he flew down the other aisle; he crossed before the doors; he clamored up the home-stretch; his anguish grew with his progress, till presently he was but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and the speed of light." Calling the dog a "woolly comet" mainly conveys

1. The sentence before the comparison traces a full circuit, up one aisle, across the front, down the other aisle and back. 2. A comet is a bright object that travels fast along a fixed path, so the shape of the movement matches. 3. The words that follow, gleam and speed of light, keep both the brightness and the pace. 4. Woolly is the only part that belongs to the dog, and it keeps the joke visible. 5. So the image carries speed and brightness on a circling path, option A. 6. Option B contradicts the speed the comparison exists to convey. 7. Option D describes the room after the dog is thrown out, not the dog itself. _Source: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), public domain_