ctically all of the shops were closed, only the saloons
being open.

The Italian had named his restaurant The Venezia in honor of his native
city. It was a bright, comfortable little room, the kitchen at the back
of it lightly screened from the dining room. It adjoined his hotel,
quite a large building, where he proudly told us he had twenty-two beds.
His wife, a stout, bright-eyed woman, cheerfully took our order. "I am
poor," she said smilingly, "so I cook when other people ask me. If I
rich I cook when I feel like it." A savory smell arose from her frying
pan, and we were soon eating excellent and generous slices of ham,
drinking very respectable tea, and enjoying some good bread and butter.
It was a most refreshing supper after a long and somewhat trying day. We
expressed our appreciation to our Italian friends and paid the very
modest reckoning.

CHAPTER VIII

The next morning we had breakfast at Brown's Hotel. The landlord called
my attention to a robin who was building her nest in a tree in front of
the hotel; the only tree that I recall seeing on the bare, bald, yellow
village street.

In our long ride of the day before, we had come through Edwards Creek
Valley, the Smith Creek Valley, the Reese River Valley, the Antelope
Valley, the Monitor Valley, and other great valleys of whose names I was
not sure. We had seen the Clan Alpine Mountains from Alpine ranch, the
Toyabee National Range, and other ranges whose names were too many and
too local for me to be sure of them. And I had read of 275,000 acres
that had been placed on the market in Elko County alone. I had read in
the Elko paper that "For years, there was a popular prejudice in the
East that Nevada was one grand glorious desert, the land worthless, and
that nothing could be grown out here. But in later years the public back
East has been shown that such is not the case, but on the contrary, we
have the richest land in Elko County to be found anywhere in the United
States, and that the crops here are the best and almost anything can be
grown in Elko County."

Having seen the rich land of our brave homesteader in Monitor Valley, I
was ready to believe this outburst of local pride.

It was the 23rd of June when the landlord of Brown's Hotel waved his
farewell to us and we drove on. All day we were among the hills, not
seeing them on far distant horizons, but continually climbing and
descending among them. Twenty-three miles from Eureka we saw a