HOWITT, WILLIAM, a miscellaneous writer, who, with his equally talented wife, MARY HOWITT (1799-1888) (nee Botham), did much to popularise the rural life of England, born, a Quaker’s son, at Heanor, Derbyshire; served his time as a carpenter, but soon drifted into literature, married in 1821, and made many tours in England and other lands for literary purposes; was a voluminous writer, pouring out histories, accounts of travel, tales, and poems; amongst these are “Rural Life in England,” “Visits to Remarkable Places,” “Homes and Haunts of the Poets,” &c. (1792-1879).  His wife, besides collaborating with him in such works as “Stories of English Life,” “Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain,” wrote poems, tales, &c., and was the first to translate the fairy-tales of Hans Andersen.

HOWRAH or HAURA (130), a flourishing manufacturing town on the Hooghly, opposite Calcutta, with which it is connected by a floating bridge.

HOY, a steep, rocky islet in the Orkney group, about 1 m.  SW. of Mainland or Pomona, remarkable for its huge cliffs.

HOYLAKE (3), a rising watering-place in Cheshire, at the seaward end of Wirral Peninsula, 8 m.  W. of Birkenhead; noted for its golf-links.

HOYLE, EDMOND, the inventor of whist, lived in London; wrote on games and taught whist; his “Short Treatise on Whist” appeared in 1742 (1672-1769).

HROLF, ROLLO, DUKE OF NORMANDY (q. v.)

HUANCAVELI`CA (104), a dep. of Peru, lies within the region of the Cordilleras, has rich silver and quicksilver mines; the capital (4), bearing the same name, is a mining town 150 m.  SE. of Lima.

HUB OF THE UNIVERSE, a name humorously given by Wendell Holmes to Boston, or rather the State House of the city.

HUBER, FRANCIS, naturalist, born at Geneva; made a special study of the habits of bees, and recorded the results in his “Observations sur les Abeilles” (1750-1831).

HUBERT, ST., bishop of Liege and Maestricht, the patron-saint of huntsmen; was converted when hunting on Good Friday by a milk-white stag appearing in the forest of Ardennes with a crucifix between its horns; generally represented in art as a hunter kneeling to a crucifix borne by a stag (656-728).

HUBERT DE BURGH, Earl of Kent, chief justiciary of England under King John and Henry III.; had charge of Prince Arthur, but refused to put him to death; was present at Runnymede at the signing of Magna Charta; d. 1234.

HUC, a French missionary, born at Toulouse; visited China and Thibet, and wrote an account of his experiences on his return (1813-1860).

HUDDERSFIELD (96), a busy manufacturing town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, is favourably situated in a coal district on the Colne, 26 m.  NE. of Manchester; is substantially built, and is the northern centre of the “fancy trade” and woollen goods; cotton, silk, and machine factories and iron-founding are also carried on on a large scale.