Guide-books are so many that it seems probable we have more than any other country-possibly more than all the rest of the universe together. Every county has a little library of its own-guides to its towns, churches, abbeys, castles, rivers, mountains; finally, to the county as a whole.

This edition of WH Hudson's novella El Ombu (together with three other stories of the Argentinian pampas: "The Story of a Piebald Horse," "Nino Diablo" and "Marta Riquelme," as well as an appendix to the original tale) includes an extensive critical introduction by Hudson scholar David Miller. W H (William Henry) Hudson was born in Argentina in 1841, the son of Americans of British ancestry, and moved to England in 1874. He was distinguished as both a fiction writer and a naturalist. His literary associates included Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, R B Cunninghame Graham, George Gissing and...

Green Mansions is an exotic and tragic romance about a young man who travels to Venezuela. He lives there with an Indian tribe, but his new-found life is shaken when he meets the "magical" forest-dweller, Rima. He is moved by her story and travels through the jungle with her and her grandfather to find the answers she doesn't have about her past. But the presence of the young man has changed the Indian tribe forever, with vast and tragic consequences.

A Crystal Age is a utopian novel/ Dystopia written by W. H. Hudson, first published in 1887. The book has been called a "significant S-F milestone" and has been noted for its anticipation of the "modern ecological mysticism" that would evolve a century later. The book was first issued anonymously in 1887. The second edition of 1906 identified the author by name, and included a preface by Hudson. The third edition of 1916 added a foreword by Clifford Smith.Hudson's second novel was one element in the major wave of utopian and dystopian literature that characterized the final decades of the...

Summary Richard Lamb married Paquita without her father's consent and eloped with her to Montevideo. There they went to see Dona Isidora, a relative of Paquita, and stayed with her for some time. Dona Isidora gave Lamb a letter to the overseer of the Estancia de la Virgen de los Desamparados, a ranch called in English Vagabond's Rest. Lamb departed with the letter, and in the Florida department, he began to learn the history of the unhappy land of Uruguay. The Argentines and Brazilians interfered in the country's politics, and, as if the foreign influences were not enough to cause trouble,...

William Henry Hudson (4 August 1841 - 18 August 1922) was an author, naturalist, and ornithologist. Life and work: Hudson was born in the borough of Quilmes, now Florencio Varela of the greater Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. He was the son of Daniel Hudson and his wife Catherine nee Kemble, United States settlers of English and Irish origin. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier, publishing his ornithological work in Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society, initially in an...

A Crystal Age is a utopian novel/ Dystopia written by W. H. Hudson, first published in 1887.The book has been called a "significant S-F milestone"and has been noted for its anticipation of the "modern ecological mysticism" that would evolve a century later. William Henry Hudson (4 August 1841 - 18 August 1922) was an author, naturalist, and ornithologist. Life and work: Hudson was born in the borough of Quilmes, now Florencio Varela of the greater Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. He was the son of Daniel Hudson and his wife Catherine nee Kemble, United States settlers of...

In recalling those scenes which have given me the greatest happiness, the images of which are most vivid and lasting, I find that most of them are of scenes or objects which were discovered, as it were, by chance, which I had not heard of, or else had heard of and forgotten, or which I had not expected to see. They came as a surprise, and in the following instance one may see that it makes a vast difference whether we do or do not experience such a sensation. In the course of a ramble on foot in a remote district I came to a small ancient town, set in a cuplike depression amidst high...

On the second day of my illness, during an interval of comparative ease, I fell into recollections of my childhood, and at once I had that far, that forgotten past with me again as I had never previously had it. It was not like that mental condition, known to most persons, when some sight or sound or, more frequently, the perfume of some flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and so vividly that it is almost an illusion. That is an intensely emotional condition and vanishes as quickly as it comes. This was different. To return to the simile and metaphor used at the...