“But I am going to be glorious and great,” thought Lampblack, and his heart swelled high; for never more would they be able to hurl the name of Deposit at him, a name which hurt him none the less, but all the more indeed, because it was unintelligible.

“You will do for this work,” said the master, and let Lampblack out of his metal prison house into the light and touched him with the brush that was the wand of magic.

“What am I going to be?” wondered Lampblack, as he felt himself taken on to a large piece of deal board, so large that he felt he must be going to make the outline of an athlete or the shadows of a tempest at the least.

Himself he could not tell what he was becoming:  he was happy enough and grand enough only to be employed, and, as he was being used, began to dream a thousand things of all the scenes he would be in, and all the hues that he would wear, and all the praise that he would hear when he went out into that wonderful great world of which his master was an idol.  From his secret dreams he was harshly roused; all the colors were laughing and tittering round him till the little tin helmets they wore shook with their merriment.

“Old Deposit is going to be a signpost,” they cried to one another so merrily that the spiders, who are not companionable creatures, felt themselves compelled to come to the doors of their dens and chuckle too.  A signpost!  Lampblack, stretched out in an ecstasy upon the board, roused himself shivering from his dreams, and gazed at his own metamorphosis.  He had been made into seven letters, thus:—­

BANDITA

This word in the Italian country, where the English painter’s studio was, means, Do not trespass, do not shoot, do not show yourself here:  anything, indeed, that is peremptory and uncivil to all trespassers.  In these seven letters, outspread upon the board, was Lampblack crucified!

Farewell, ambitious hopes and happy dreams!  He had been employed to paint a signboard, a thing stoned by the boys, blown on by the winds, gnawed by the rats, and drenched with the winter’s rains.  Better the dust and the cobwebs of his old corner than such shame as this!

But help was there none.  His fate was fixed.  He was dried with a drench of turpentine, hastily clothed in a coat of copal, and here he yet was fully aware of all his misery, was being borne away upon the great board out of doors and handed to the gardener.  For the master was a hasty and ardent man, and had been stung into impatience by the slaughter of some favorite blue thrushes in his ilex trees that day, and so in his haste had chosen to do journeyman’s work himself.  Lampblack was carried out of the studio for the last time, and as the door closed on him he heard all the colors laughing, and the laugh of little Rose Madder was highest of all as she cried to Naples Yellow, who was a dandy and made court to her:  “Poor old ugly Deposit!  He will grumble to the owls and the bats now!”