keeping an opium den, and there entertained her son Jasper, already
an accomplished vocalist, but in a lower station than that to which
his musical genius later raised him, as lay Precentor? If the
Princess Puffer be, as on Mr. Cuming Walters's theory she is,
Edwin's long-lost grandmother, her discovery would be unwelcome to
Edwin. Probably she did not live much longer; "my lungs are like
cabbage nets," she says. Mr. Cuming Walters goes on -

"Her purpose is left obscure. How easily, however, we see
possibilities in a direction such as this. The father, perhaps a
proud, handsome man, deserts the woman, and removes the child. The
woman hates both for scorning her, but the father dies, or
disappears, and is beyond her vengeance. Then the child, victim to
the ills in his blood, creeps back to the opium den, not knowing
his mother, but immediately recognized by her. She will make the
child suffer for the sins of the father, who had destroyed her
happiness. Such a theme was one which appealed to Dickens. It
must not, however, be urged; and the crucial question after all is
concerned with the opium woman as one of the unconscious
instruments of justice, aiding with her trifle of circumstantial
evidence the Nemesis awaiting Jasper.

"Another hypothesis--following on the Carker theme in 'Dombey and
Son'--is that Jasper, a dissolute and degenerate man, lascivious,
and heartless, may have wronged a child of the woman's; but it is
not likely that Dickens would repeat the Mrs. Brown story."

Jasper, pere, father of John Jasper and of Mrs. Drood, however
handsome, ought not to have deserted Mrs. Jasper. Whether John
Jasper, prematurely devoted to opium, became Edwin's guardian at