window-seat in an alcove of the great play-hall, I passed recess after recess in haranguing a multitude upon the subject of Freedom, with as little success as most apostles, and with only less than their crowd of martyrdom, because, though small boys are more malicious than men, they cannot hit so hard. Experiences like these may have inspired Ludlow in his first published work that has survived to this day. The poem, Truth on His Travels has "Truth" personified and wandering the earth, trying in vain to find some band of people who will respect him. The pages of The Hasheesh Eater introduce a bookish and near-sighted young Ludlow: "into books, ill health, and musing I settled down when I should have been playing cricket, hunting, or riding. The younger thirst for adventure was quenched by rapid degrees as I found it possible to ascend Chimborazo with Humboldt lying on a sofa, or chase harte-beests with Cumming over muffins and coffee." A family legend, later used to explain his attraction for intoxicants, is that when Ludlow was two years old he "would climb upon the breakfast table and eat Cayenne pepper from the castor!" Henry Ludlow’s father was a pioneer temperance advocate, according to one source "adopting and advocating its principles before any general and organized effort for them." Henry himself, in one of his few preserved sermons, attacked Great Britain for "her cruel oppression of her East India subjects, often starving… and forced to cultivate opium on land they need to supply themselves with bread…" and defended China "for resisting a traffick which was sapping, by its terrible effects upon her citizens, the very foundation of her empire…" Fitz Hugh's father had obvious and enormous influence on him, with his mother playing a more marginal role in his life. Abigail Woolsey Wells died a few months after Ludlow's twelfth birthday. At her funeral, the presiding minister said that “[f]or many years she has scarcely known what physical ease and comfort were. She labored with a body prostrated and suffering; and laid herself down to sleep in pain.” His mother's suffering may have brought out in Ludlow an obsession with mortality and the connection between the spiritual and animal in man. It was observed that “through all her life [she] had a constitutional and indescribable dread of death; not so much the fear of being dead, as of dying itself.