to kick a drug addiction, but he quickly started up a relationship with Maria O. Milliken, of whom little is known except that she was ten years his senior and had children of her own. They were married shortly after Rosalie's marriage to Bierstadt. New York stories There was little in the field of literature that Ludlow did not feel qualified to attempt. He wrote stories for the magazines of his day, poetry, political commentary, art-, music-, drama-, and literary-criticism, and science and medical writing. As a newspaper writer, he also translated articles from foreign newspapers. Most of his stories were light-hearted romances, sprinkled with characters like “Mr. W. Dubbleyew,” or “Major Highjinks,” and generally concerning some semi-ridiculous obstacle that comes between the narrator and a beautiful young woman he's fallen in love with. Occasional stories break from this pattern: The Phial of Dread The Phial of Dread was one of Ludlow's earliest magazine stories, published in October 1859. It is written as the journal of a chemist who is visited in his laboratory by the insane daughter of an acquaintance, who felt herself pursued by Death. When she got to the lab, she immediately sought out some chemical with which she could kill herself: We were alone together among the strange poisons, each one of whom, with a quicker or a slower death-devil in his eye, sat in his glass or porcelain sentry-box, a living force of bale. Should it be Hemp? No, that was too slow, uncertain, painful. Morphine? Too many antidotes — too much commonness, ostentation in that. Daturin? I did not like to ask how much of that was certain… She finally stabs herself in the heart with a knife she finds in the lab. The author of the journal, Edgar Sands, panics, fearing that he will be blamed for the death, and attempts to destroy the body, …he went calmly to work, with an awful despair in his eyes, and cut the shell of me — the husk I had left — to pieces; as a surgeon would, on a table in the laboratory. These fragments he screwed down into a large retort, and placed in the fiercest of flames, fed with pure oxygen… I knew that all of me that had been seen on earth was reducing there to its ultimates — I was distilled there by degrees. Her soul becomes trapped in the