Amazon.com description: Product Description: From the PREFACE.

IN view of the action of the Mormon authorities who, last Fourth of July, hung the proud flag of our country at half- mast, during that day of national rejoicing, we may say to our National Legislature, "You have scotched the snake, not killed it," and it may yet sting you vitally; for these Mormons swear in the Endowment House "To obey the laws of the Mormon church, and all they enjoin, in preference to those of the United States."

The strength of this people would be materially lessened if our immigration laws were so amended as to cut off this great influx of the ignorant, almost pauper, emigrants of the old world. Let "America be henceforth for Americans." The struggle for bread, for life, is becoming too severe here, since the country has become so filled with adult aliens from abroad. We need the room — shut down the gates!

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An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter.

"YOU are very kind, Doctor, to climb, so often, these I tedious flights of stairs, with food and medicine for a friendless man. Death is coming to relieve you. For months I have not been able to work, and my money is gone."

"Yonder writing-desk was Adze's; that and the enclosed manuscript is now yours; publish it if possible; the world may need the story."

"I was a Mormon — am now an apostate. I have wandered through country, village and city, till, crushed and penniless, I die to fill a nameless grave. Ah, Adele! thy wrongs are avenged in me Doctor! God!"

And, with outstretched hand, my first patient, Frederic Hersch, dropped into the Infinite.

Though myself a son of poverty, Hersch was buried plainly in Greenwood, and the prayers of the Anglican Church were read above him — myself being minister and mourner; the undertaker and his assistant completed the funeral train. Here and there, out of door or window of the old tenant house, was thrust the head of some wild tangle-haired woman or child, as the dead was borne down the stairway; none other took note of "the pauper whom nobody owned."

At evening, returned to my plain, bachelor room, I sat down to examine my legacy — "Adele's writing-desk." It was a simple, ebony box, containing a manuscript, a journal, and letters written in French, from which the manuscript had evidently been compiled. " Adele's diary — Adele's letter! "Who was Adele?

Whoever reads these pages will learn all I know; they were printed verbatim from the Hersch manuscript.