In criticising my former stories several reviewers, some of them distinguished in letters, have done me the honour to remark that there was latent laughter in many of my scenes and conversations, but that I was unconscious of it. Be that as it may, those who enjoy unconscious absurdity will certainly find it in the utterances of the self-styled prophet of the Mormons. Probably one gleam of the sacred fire of humour would have saved him and his apostles the very unnecessary trouble of being Mormons at all. In looking over the problems involved in such a career as Smith's, we must be struck by the necessity for able and unprejudiced research into the laws which govern apparent marvels. Notwithstanding the very natural and sometimes justifiable aspersions which have been cast upon the work of the Society for Psychical Research, it does appear that the disinterested service rendered by its more distinguished members is the only attempt hitherto made to aid people of the so-called "mediumistic" temperament to understand rather than be swayed by their delusions. Whether such a result is as yet possible or not, Mormonism affords a gigantic proof of the crying need of an effort in this direction; for men are obviously more ignorant of their own elusive mental conditions than of any other branch of knowledge. L.D. MONTREAL, December, 1898. THE MORMON PROPHET. _BOOK I._ CHAPTER I. In the United States of America there was, in the early decades of this century, a very widely spread excitement of a religious sort. Except in the few long-settled portions of the eastern coast, the people were scattered over an untried country; means of travel were slow; news from a distance was scarce; new heavens and a new earth surrounded the settlers. In the veins of many of them ran the blood of those who had been persecuted for their faith: Covenanters, Quakers, sectaries of diverse sorts who could transmit to their descendants their instincts of fiery zeal, their cravings for "the light that never was on sea or land," but not that education by contact with law and order which, in older states, could not fail to moderate reasonable minds.