The situations are startling, I admit, but how would Canon Crisparkle like them? He is, we know, to marry Helena, “the young person, my dear,” Miss Twinkleton would say, “who for months lived alone, at inns, wearing a blue surtout, a buff waistcoat, and grey—” Here horror chokes the utterance of Miss Twinkleton. “Then she was in the vault in _another_ disguise, not more womanly, at that awful scene when poor Mr. Jasper was driven mad, so that he confessed all sorts of nonsense, for, my dear, all the Close believes that it _was_ nonsense, and that Mr. Jasper was reduced to insanity by persecution. And Mr. Crisparkle, with that elegant dainty mother of his—it has broken her heart—is marrying this half-caste gipsy _trollop_, with her blue surtout and grey—oh, it is a disgrace to Cloisterham!” The climax, in fact, as devised by Mr. Cuming Walters, is rather too dramatic for the comfort of a minor canon. A humorist like Dickens ought to have seen the absurdity of the situation. Mr. Walters _may_ be right, Helena may be Datchery, but she ought not to be. WHO WAS THE PRINCESS PUFFER? Who was the opium hag, the Princess Puffer? Mr. Cuming Walters writes: “We make a guess, for Dickens gives us no solid facts. But when we remember that not a word is said throughout the volume of Jasper’s antecedents, who he was, and where he came from; when we remember that but for his nephew he was a lonely man; when we see that he was both criminal and artist; when we observe his own wheedling propensity, his false and fulsome protestations of affection, his slyness, his subtlety, his heartlessness, his tenacity; and when, above all, we know that the opium vice is _hereditary_, and that a _young_ man would not be addicted to it unless born with the craving; {91} then, it is not too wild a conjecture that Jasper was the wayward progeny of this same opium-eating woman, all of whose characteristics he possessed, and, perchance, of a man of criminal instincts, but of a superior position. Jasper is a morbid and diseased being while still in the twenties, a mixture of genius and vice. He hates and he loves fiercely, as if there were wild gipsy blood in his veins. Though seemingly a model of decorum and devoted to his art, he complains of his “daily drudging round” and “the cramped monotony of his existence.” He commits his crime with the ruthlessness of a beast, his own nature being wholly untamed. If we deduce that his father was an adventurer and a vagabond, we shall not be far wrong. If we deduce that his mother was the opium-eater, prematurely aged, who had transmitted her vicious propensity to her child, we shall almost certainly be right.” WHO WAS JASPER?