The things we do!

But though many of those western wilderness immigrants were "poor
pilgrims" and for a time squatters (as the immediately extramural
population of Paris), they were recruited from the sturdiest stock on the
Atlantic side of the fortifications. Some went, to be sure, who had failed
in the old place, but were ready to make new hazard; some wanted greater
freedom than the more highly socialized and conventionalized life within
the fortifications would permit; some longed for adventure; some sought a
fortune or competency perhaps impossible in the old settlements; some had
only the inherited promptings of the nomad savage in them, and kept ever
moving on, making their nameless graves out in the gloom of the forest or
upon the silent plains.
It was indeed a motley procession, the by-product of the more or less
conservative, sometimes politically or religiously intolerant,
aristocratic tide-water settlements. Yet do not make the mistake of
thinking that it was slag or refuse humanity, such as camps in the narrow
zone around the gates of Paris.


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