THE CARNATION. 11 



perished. Kit's lamentations about his flowers were 

 loud and incessant ; they were heard in all the vil- 

 lages around him he repeated them to his cus- 

 tomers at home and abroad and the cause he 

 could not divine the cause. 



It was well for him that all this happened before 

 Mr. Pitt, prime minister of state, had laid a sump- 

 tuary tax on heads that wore hair powder; had 

 these two evils occurred at the same time,, they must 

 have broken poor Nunn's heart. But to cut the 

 tale short, in the same way that the said tax cut off 

 the pig-tails of many of his customers afterwards, 

 Kit was not aware, till he had been informed by 

 some chemist, naturalist, or botanist, that the hob- 

 nails, the filings, the flakes, and the bits of iron, that 

 had been swept up and mixed with the dung, had 

 been the cause of all the mischief, and which had 

 produced that ' salsa rubigo,' rust and canker, which, 

 liad corrupted and poisoned the juices of the plants, 

 and nearly destroyed the whole. He never after 

 could endure the sight of a rusty nail in his com- 

 post. So much for poor Christopher Nuna ! 



