The Superior Times

Death of Dickens' "Lascar Sal,"

From the London Echo.

There have been many women for whom a stanza of a poet has been a brevet of perpetual fame, and sometimes, as in the case of Mrs. Black, of Athens, a provision of a more substantial kind from the pockets of the poet's admirers. The same can hardly be said of the personages who sat for their pictures to our great novelist, Dickens, who often thought fit to reverse the principle of "nihil tetigit quod non ornavit," and "touched nothing" without making it more grotesque. Among the characters whom he appears to have drawn truly enough, albeit in most repulsive colors, was the wretched creature called "Lascar Sal," described in "Edwin Drood" as the female purveyor of opium, and herself a smoker of the drug. This miserable woman, it appears, died recently of scarlet fever, in a frightful condition of neglect and destitution, in a court in Bluegate Fields, in St. George's-in-the-East. Naturally the vice to which she had addicted herself, and the effects of which, the Lancet remarks, are frequently seen in all their hideousness by medical practitioners in the East End, left her in a state of low vitality unfit to contend with the disease to which she immediately succumbed. In her filthy and miserable room we are informed that white mice were found running about to the number of "several hundred." Making allowance for exaggeration, and supposing the poor woman to have fed some dozens of the little animals in her extreme poverty, we have a curious and not unaffecting picture of a human being ruined by a soul-and-body-destroying propensity, yet retaining so much of gentleness in her isolation and degradation as to care for these minute friends-possibly the only creatures in the world who did not shrink from "Lascar Sal."