r, 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 rema