occasional alkali flats that are smooth and hard enough to play croquet on; and this afternoon, while riding with careless ease across one of these places, I am struck with the novelty of the situation.  I am in the midst of the dreariest, deadest-looking country imaginable.  Whirlwinds of sand, looking at a distance like huge columns of smoke, are wandering erratically over the plains in all directions.  The blazing sun casts, with startling vividness on the smooth white alkali, that awful scraggy, straggling shadow that, like a vengeful fate, always accompanies the cycler on a sunny day, and which is the bane of a sensitive wheelman’s life.  The only representative of animated nature hereabouts is a species of small gray lizard that scuttles over the bare ground with astonishing rapidity.  Not even a bird is seen in the air.  All living things seem instinctively to avoid this dread spot save the lizard.  A desert forty miles wide is not a particularly large one; but when one is in the middle of it, it might as well be as extensive as Sahara itself, for anything he can see to the contrary, and away off to the right I behold as perfect a mirage as one could wish to see.  A person can scarce help believing his own eyes, and did one not have some knowledge of these strange and wondrous phenomena, one’s orbs of vision would indeed open with astonishment; for seemingly but a few miles away is a beautiful lake, whose shores are fringed with wavy foliage, and whose cool waters seem to lave the burning desert sands at its edge.

A short distance to the right of Hot Springs Station broken clouds of steam are seen rising from the ground, as though huge caldrons of water were being heated there.  Going to the spot I find, indeed, " caldrons of boiling water;” but the caldrons are in the depths.  At irregular openings in the rocky ground the bubbling water wells to the surface, and the fires-ah! where are the fires.  On another part of this desert are curious springs that look demure and innocuous enough most of the time, but occasionally they emit columns of spray and steam.  It is related of these springs that once a party of emigrants passed by, and one of the men knelt down to take a drink of the clear, nice-looking water.  At the instant he leaned over, the spring spurted a quantity of steam and spray all over him, scaring him nearly out of his wits.  The man sprang up, and ran as if for his life, frantically beckoning the wagons to move on, at the same time shouting, at the top of his voice, “Drive on! drive on! hell’s no great distance from here!”

>From the Forty-mile Desert my road leads up the valley of the Humboldt River.  On the shores of Humboldt Lake are camped a dozen Piute lodges, and I make a half-hour halt to pay them a visit.  I shall never know whether I am a welcome visitor or not; they show no signs of pleasure or displeasure as I trundle the bicycle through the sage-brush toward them.  Leaning it familiarly up against one of their teepes,