by
shipwreck, of her brother Benjamin, to which she could resign herself
from a conviction that the stroke was sent as a chastisement to her,
and was a merciful dispensation to draw his young wife nearer to God.
We read not one word of solicitude for mother, or brothers, or sisters,
not a single prayer for their conversion. She was too busy watching and
weeping over her own short-comings to concern herself about their doom.
The long diary is filled with the reiteration of her fears, her
sorrows, and her prayers. Many years afterwards she thus referred to
this condition of her mind:--

"I cannot without shuddering look back to that period. How dreadful did
the state of my mind become! Nothing interested me; I fulfilled my
duties without any feeling of satisfaction, in gloomy silence. My lips
moved in prayer, my feet carried me to the holy sanctuary, but my heart
was estranged from piety. I felt as if my doom was irrevocably fixed,
and I was destined to that fire which is never quenched. I have never
experienced any feeling so terrific as the despair of salvation. My
soul still remembers the wormwood and the gall, still remembers how
awful the conviction that every door of hope was closed, and that I was
given over unto death."

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 dissa