In July, Jasper revisits the London opium den, and talks under opium, watched by the old hag. He speaks of a thing which he often does in visions: “a hazardous and perilous journey, over abysses where a slip would be destruction. Look down, look down! You see what lies at the bottom there?” He enacts the vision and says, “There was a fellow traveller.” He “speaks in a whisper, and as if in the dark.” The vision is, in this case, “a poor vision: no struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty.” Edwin, in the reminiscent vision, dies very easily and rapidly. “When it comes to be real at last, it is so short that it seems unreal for the first time.” “And yet I never saw _that_ before. Look what a poor miserable mean thing it is. _That_ must be real. It’s over.” What can all this mean? We have been told that, shortly before Christmas Eve, Jasper took to wearing a thick black-silk handkerchief for his throat. He hung it over his arm, “his face knitted and stern,” as he entered his house for his Christmas Eve dinner. If he strangled Edwin with the scarf, as we are to suppose, he did not lead him, drugged, to the tower top, and pitch him off. Is part of Jasper’s vision reminiscent—the brief, unresisting death—while another part is a separate vision, is _prospective_, “premonitory”? Does he see himself pitching Neville Landless off the tower top, or see him fallen from the Cathedral roof? Is Neville’s body “_that_”—“I never saw _that_ before. Look what a poor miserable mean thing it is! _That_ must be real.” Jasper “never saw _that_”—the dead body below the height—before. _This_ vision, I think, is of the future, not of the past, and is meant to bewilder the reader who thinks that the whole represents the slaying of Drood. The tale is rich in “warnings” and telepathy. DATCHERY AND THE OPIUM WOMAN The hag now tracks Jasper home to Cloisterham. Here she meets Datchery, whom she asks how she can see Jasper? If Datchery is Drood, he now learns, _what he did not know before_, _that there is some connection between Jasper and the hag_. He walks with her to the place where Edwin met the hag, on Christmas Eve, and gave her money; and he jingles his own money as he walks. The place, or the sound of the money, makes the woman tell Datchery about Edwin’s gift of three shillings and sixpence for opium. Datchery, “with a sudden change of countenance, gives her a sudden look.” It does not follow that he is _not_ Drood, for, though the hag’s love of opium was known to Drood, Datchery is not to reveal his recognition of the woman. He does what any stranger would do; he “gives a sudden look,” as if surprised by the mention of opium.