Naturally, such a strain at last impaired her health, and, her mother becoming alarmed, she was sent in the autumn of 1820 to North Carolina, where several relatives owned plantations on the Cape Fear River.  She was welcomed with great affection, especially by her aunt, the wife of her uncle James Smith, and mother of Barnwell Rhett. (This name was assumed by him on the inheritance of property from a relative of that name.)

In the village near which this aunt lived there was no place of worship except the Methodist meeting-house.  Sarah attended this; and under the earnest and alarming preaching she heard there, together with association with some of the most spiritual-minded of the members, she was aroused from her apathetic state, and was enabled to join in their services with some interest.  She even offered up prayer with them, and at one of their love feasts delivered a public testimony to the truths of the gospel.  Thus associated with them, she was induced to examine their principles and doctrines, but found them as faulty as all the rest she had from time to time investigated.  She therefore soon decided not to become one of them.  From her earliest serious impressions, she had been dissatisfied with Episcopacy, feeling its forms lifeless; but now, after having carefully considered the various other sects, and finding error in all, she concluded to remain in the church whose doctrines at least satisfied her as well as those of any other, and were those of her mother and her family.

Of the Society of Friends she knew little, and that little was unfavorable.  To a remark made one day by her mother, relative to her turning Quaker, she replied, with some warmth:—­

“Anything but a Quaker or a Catholic!”

Having made up her mind that the Friends were wrong, she had steadily refused, during her stay in Philadelphia, to attend their meetings or read any of their writings.  Nevertheless many things about them, scarcely noticed at the time,—­their quiet dress, orderly manner of life and gentle tones of voice, together with their many acts of kindness to her and her father,—­came back to her after she had left them, and especially impressed her as contrasting so strongly with the slack habits and irregular discipline which made her own home so unhappy.

On the vessel which carried her from Philadelphia to Charleston, after her father’s death, was a party of Friends; and in the seven days which it then required to make the voyage, an intimacy sprang up between them and Sarah which influenced her whole after-life.  From one of them she had accepted a copy of Woolman’s works,—­evidence that there must have been religious discussions between them.  And that there was talk—­ probably some jesting—­in the family about Quakers is shown by the little incident Sarah relates of her brother Thomas presenting her, soon after her return from North Carolina, with a volume of Quaker writings he had picked up at some sale.  He placed it in her hand, saying jocosely,—­