Page:Stories and story-telling (1915).djvu/194

 From where he was disgraced upon the tree-trunk he could no longer even see his beloved home, the studio; he could see only 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 with the storm of the night.

A man passed in a miller's cart, and stood up and scowled at him, because the people had liked to come and shoot and trap the birds of the master's wooded gardens, and they 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 lonely 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 much strength to continue to exist. His loyal heart almost hated the master who had brought him to such a fate as this.