been closed up in one guilty man's mind."

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