At Elko, where I take dinner, I make the acquaintance of an individual, rejoicing in the sobriquet of “Alkali Bill,” who has the largest and most comprehensive views of any person I ever met.  He has seen a paragraph, something about me riding round the world, and he considerately takes upon himself the task of summing up the few trifling obstacles that I shall encounter on the way round: 

“There is only a small rise at Sherman,” he rises to explain, " and another still smaller at the Alleghanies; all the balance is downhill to the Atlantic.  Of course you’ll have to ‘boat it’ across the Frogpond; then there’s Europe — mostly level; so is Asia, except the Himalayas — and you can soon cross them; then you’re all ‘hunky,’ for there’s no mountains to speak of in China.”  Evidently Alkali Bill is a person who points the finger of scorn at small ideas, and leaves the bothersome details of life to other and smaller-minded folks.  In his vast and glorious imagery he sees a centaur-like cycler skimming like a frigate-bird across states and continents, scornfully ignoring sandy deserts and bridgeless streams, halting for nothing but oceans, and only slowing up a little when he runs up against a peak that bobs up its twenty thousand feet of snowy grandeur serenely in his path.  What a Ceasar is lost to this benighted world, because in its blindness, it will not search out such men as Alkali and ask them to lead it onward to deeds of inconceivable greatness.  Alkali Bill can whittle more chips in an hour than some men could in a week.  Much of the Humboldt Valley, through which my road now runs, is at present flooded from the vast quantities of water that are pouring into it from the Ruby Range of mountains now visible to the southeast, and which have the appearance of being the snowiest of any since leaving the Sierras.  Only yesterday I threatened to shed blood before I left Nevada, and sure enough my prophecy is destined to speedy fulfilment.  Just east of the Osino Ca¤on, and where the North Fork of the Humboldt comes down from the north and joins the main stream, is a stretch of swampy ground on which swarms of wild ducks and geese are paddling about.  I blaze away at them, and a poor inoffensive gosling is no more.  While writing my notes this evening, in a room adjoining the “bar” at Halleck, near the United States fort of the same name, I overhear a boozy soldier modestly informing his comrades that forty-five miles an hour is no unusual speed to travel with a bicycle.  Gradually I am nearing the source of the Humboldt, and at the town of Wells I bid it farewell for good.  Wells is named from a group of curious springs near the town.  They are supposed to be extinct volcanoes, now filled with water; and report says that no sounding-line has yet been found long enough to fathom the bottom.  Some day when some poor, unsuspecting tenderfoot is peering inquisitively down one of these well-like springs, the volcano may suddenly come into play again