These questions belong to the short novel <em>"The Call of the Wild"</em>. It was written by Jack London and published in 1903. One of the characters mentioned in the questions is the dog Buck. He is the central character of the story and it is told from his perspective.
When London speaks of Buck (metamorphosing), he means that Buck lost his appetite.
If you fail to clean your room or make your bed, you could be described as slovenly.
The farmer had to remove a large thorn from the horse's (hindquarters) rear leg.
Michael scanned his clean room one last time before he left, remembering how his mother always called him (fastidious) attentive to details.
In the Call of the Wild, Buck learns to never steal.
obby Holloway says my imagination is a three-hundred-ring circus. Currently I was in ring two hundred and ninety-nine, with elephants dancing and clowns cart wheeling and tigers leaping through rings of fire. The time had come to step back, leave the main tent, go buy some popcorn and a Coke, bliss out, cool down.”
In Robert Southey's "The Battle of Blenheim," the skulls that turn up in the fields and by the river represent "<span>the terrible loss of life during the battle" but there are other meanings as well. </span>