The missionary spirit was early developed in her heart.  Even before her conversion, her mind was often exercised with sentiments of commiseration for the situation of ignorant heathen and idolaters; and after that event it was the leading idea of her life.

The cause of this early bias is unknown, but it was shown in her conversations, her letters and notes to friends, and in her early poetical effusions.  She even tremblingly investigated her own fitness to became a vessel of mercy to the far off, perishing heathen; and then, shrinking from what seemed to her the presumptuous thought, she gave herself with new zeal to the work of benefitting these immediately around her.  “Shortly after her conversion,” says her brother, “she observed the destitute condition of the children in the neighborhood in which she resided.  With the assistance of some young friends as teachers, she organized and continued through the favorable portions of the year, a Sunday-school, of which she assumed the responsibility of superintendent; and at the usual annual celebrations, she with her teachers and scholars joined in the exercises which accompany that festival.”

“It is my ardent desire,” she writes to a friend, “that the glorious work of reformation may extend till every knee shall bow to the living God.  For this expected, this promised era, let us pray earnestly, unceasingly, and with faith.  How can I be so inactive, when I know that thousands are perishing in this land of grace; and millions in other lands are at this very moment kneeling before senseless idols!”

And in her journal—­“Sinners perishing all around me, and I almost panting to tell the far heathen of Christ!  Surely this is wrong.  I will no longer indulge the vain foolish wish, but endeavor to be useful in the position where Providence has placed me.  I can pray for deluded idolaters, and for those who labor among them, and this is a privilege indeed.”

This strong bias of her mind toward a missionary life, was well known to her mother, who still remembers with a tender interest an incident connected with it.  Sarah had been deeply affected by the death of Colman, who in the midst of his labors among the heathen, had suddenly been called to his reward.  Some time afterward she returned from an evening meeting, and with a countenance radiant with joy, announced—­what her pastor had mentioned in the meeting—­that a successor to Colman had been found; a young man in Maine named Boardman had determined to raise and bear to pagan Burmah the standard which had fallen from his dying hand.  With that maternal instinct which sometimes forebodes a future calamity however improbable, her mother turned away from her daughter’s joyous face, for the thought flashed involuntarily through her mind, that the young missionary would seek as a companion of his toils, a kindred spirit; and where would he find one so congenial as the lovely being before her?