No wonder that all the birds and butterflies of the neighbourhood collect at such a beautiful spot, or that travellers go away grateful, not only for the material benefits of a good meal, but the pleasures of green trees and running water and the song of birds. An orchard, with lucerne strong and thick beneath them, promises a continuance of cultivation, but on a sudden it stops, and we find ourselves out again on the alkali plain, as barren and blistered as the banks of the Suez Canal. A tedious hour or two brings us to the river again; but man here is not agricultural, so the desert continues in spite of abundant water. And so to Lovelocks, where girls board the train as if they were brigands, urging us to buy "sweet fresh milk--five cents a glass." Indians, as usual, are lounging about on the platform, and some more of them get on to the train, and away we go again into the same Sahara as before. Humboldt Lake, the "sink" where the river disappears from the surface of the earth, and a distant glimpse of Carson's "Sink," hardly relieve the desperate monotony, for they are hideous levels of water without a vestige of vegetation, and close upon them comes as honest a tract of desert as even Africa can show, and with no more "features" on it than a plate of cold porridge has. A wolf goes limping off in a three-legged kind of way, as much as to say that, having to live in such a place, it didn't much care whether we caught it or not; and what a contrast to the pair of wolves I remember meeting one morning in Afghanistan! I was riding a camel and looking away to my right across the plain. I saw coming towards me, over the brushwood, in a series of magnificent leaps, a couple of immense wolves. I knew that wolves grew sometimes to a great size, but I had no idea that, even with their winter fur on, they could be so large as these were. And there was a majesty about their advance that fascinated me, for every bound, though it carried them twelve or fifteen feet, was so free and light that they seemed to move by machinery rather than by prodigious strength of muscle. But it suddenly occurred to me that they were crossing my path, and I saw, moreover, that our relative speeds, if maintained, might probably bring us into actual collision at the point of intersection. But it was not for me to yield the road, and the wolves thought it was not for them. And so we approached, the wolves keeping exact time and leaping together, as if trained to do it, and then, without swerving a hair's-breadth from their original course they bounded across the path only a few feet behind my camel. It was superb courage on their part, and as an episode of wild-beast life, one of the most picturesque and dramatic I ever witnessed.