He surveyed it, a hundred poor wagons, many of them without cover, loaded to the full with such nondescript belongings as a house-dwelling people, suddenly put out on the open road, would hurriedly snatch as they fled.

And the people made his heart ache, even to the deadening of his own sorrow, as he noted their wobegoneness.

For these were the sick, the infirm, the poor, the inefficient, who had been unable for one reason or another to migrate with the main body of the Saints earlier in the season.

Many of them were now racked by fever from sleeping on the damp ground.

These bade fair not to outlast some of the lumbering carts that threatened at every rough spot to jolt apart.
Yet the line bravely formed to the order of Seth Wright as captain, and the march began.