Of course relief was sent to these unhappy women as soon as possible; and when hostilities ceased, more than two hundred dollars’ worth of necessaries of every kind was despatched to them, with an urgent invitation to come and accept a home at the North.  Some time before this, however, the Welds had moved to Hyde Park, near Boston, and were delightfully located, owning their house, and surrounded by kind and congenial neighbors.  But much as they all needed entire rest, and well as they had earned it, they could not afford to be idle.  Sarah became housekeeper and general manager, while Mr. and Mrs. Weld accepted positions, in Dr. Dio Lewis’s famous school at Lexington.  They were obliged to leave home every Monday and return on Friday.

The Charleston sisters refused for some time to accept the invitation given them; but so delicately and affectionately was it urged, that, goaded by necessity, they finally consented.  They made their preparations to leave Charleston; but in the midst of them, the older sister, Mary, who had been very feeble for some time, was taken suddenly ill, and died.  Eliza, then, a most sad and desolate woman, as we may well suppose, made the voyage to New York alone.  There Sarah met her, and accompanied her to Hyde Park, where she was received with every consideration affection could devise.  She seems to have soon made up her mind to make the best of her altered circumstances, and thus show her gratitude to those who had so readily overlooked her past abuse of them.  Sarah writes of her in 1866:—­

“My sister Eliza is well and so cheerful.  She is a sunbeam in the family, but the failure of the Confederacy and the triumph of the ‘Yankees’ is hard to bear,—­the wrong having crushed the right.”

This sister was tenderly cared for until arrangements were made for her return to Charleston with Mrs. Frost.  There she died in 1867.  This was only one of the many minor cases of retribution brought about by the Nemesis of the civil war.  Sarah mentions another.  The sale of lands for government taxes at Beaufort, S.C., was made from the verandah of the Edmond Rhett House, where, more than ten years before, the rebellion was concocted by the very men whose estates then (1866) were passing under the hammer.  And the chairman of the tax committee was Dr. Wm. H. Brisbane, who, twenty-five years before, was driven from the State because he would liberate his slaves.

Quietly settled in what she felt was a permanent home, and with, no cares outside of her family, Sarah found time not only to read, but to indulge her taste for scribbling, as she called it.  She sent, from time to time, articles to the New York Tribune, the Independent, the Woman’s Journal, and other papers, all marked by remarkable freshness as well as vigor.  She also translated from the French several stories illustrative of various social reforms, and in 1867, being then seventy-five years old, she made a somewhat abridged translation of Lamartine’s poetical biography of Joan of Arc.  This was Sarah’s most finished literary work, and aroused in her great enthusiasm.  “Sometimes,” she writes, “it seems to infuse into my soul a mite of that divinity which filled hers.  Joan of Arc stands pre-eminent in my mind above all other mortals save the Christ.”