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!" 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.