The door shut, shutting him out forever from all that joyous company and palace of fair visions, and the rough hands of the gardener grasped him and carried him to the edge of the great garden, where the wall overlooked the public road, and there fastened him on high with a band of iron round the trunk of a tree.

That night it rained heavily, and the north wind blew, and there was thunder also.  Lampblack, out in the storm without his tin house to shelter him, felt that of all creatures wretched on the face of the earth there was not one so miserable as he.

A signboard!  Nothing but a signboard!

The degradation of a color, created for art and artists, could not be deeper or more grievous anywhere.  Oh, how he sighed for his tin tube and the quiet nook with the charcoal and the palette knife!

He had been unhappy there indeed, but still had had always some sort of hope to solace him—­some chance still remaining that one day fortune might smile and he be allowed to be at least the lowest stratum of some immortal work.

But now hope was there none.  His doom, his end, were fixed and changeless.  Never more could he be anything but what he was; and change there could be none till weather and time should have done their work on him, and he be rotting on the wet earth, a shattered and worm-eaten wreck.

Day broke—­a gloomy, misty morning.

From where he was crucified upon the tree-trunk he could no longer even see his beloved home, the studio; he could only see a dusky, intricate tangle of branches all about him, and below the wall of flint, with the Banksia that grew on it, and the hard muddy highway, drenched from the storm of the night.

A man passed in a miller’s cart, and stood up and swore at him, because the people had liked to come and shoot and trap the birds of the master’s wooded gardens, and knew that they must not do it now.

A slug crawled over him, and a snail also.  A woodpecker hammered at him with its strong beak.  A boy went by under the wall and threw stones at him, and called him names.  The rain poured down again heavily.  He thought of the happy painting room, where it had seemed always summer and always sunshine, and where now in the forenoon all the colors were marshaling in the pageantry of the Arts, as he had seen them do hundreds of times from his lone corner.  All the misery of the past looked happiness now.

“If I were only dead, like Flakewhite,” he thought; but the stones only bruised, they did not kill him; and the iron band only hurt, it did not stifle him.  For whatever suffers very much has always so much strength to continue to exist.  And almost his loyal heart blasphemed and cursed the master who had brought him to such a fate as this.