PENN MAKING THE TREATY WITH THE INDIANS.

[99. Penn founds[5] the city of Philadelphia; his treaty[6] with the Indians; his visit to them; how the Indians and the Quakers got on together.]—When William Penn reached America, in 1682, he sailed up the broad and beautiful Delaware River for nearly twenty miles. There he stopped, and resolved to build a city on its banks. He gave the place the Bible name of Philadelphia,[7] or the City of Brotherly Love, because he hoped that all of its citizens would live together like brothers. The streets were named from the trees then growing on the land, and so to-day many are still called Walnut, Pine, Cedar, Vine, and so on.

Penn said, "We intend to sit down lovingly among the Indians." On that account, he held a great meeting with them under a wide-spreading elm. The tree stood in what is now a part of Philadelphia. Here Penn and the red men made a treaty or agreement by which they promised each other that they would live together as friends as long as the water should run in the rivers, or the sun shine in the sky.

Nearly a hundred years later, while the Revolutionary War was going on, the British army took possession of the city. It was cold, winter weather, and the men wanted fire-wood; but the English general thought so much of William Penn that he set a guard of soldiers round the great elm, to prevent any one from chopping it down.

STATUE OF WILLIAM PENN.
(On the Tower of the new City Hall, Philadelphia.)

Not long after the great meeting under the elm, Penn visited some of the savages in their wigwams. They treated him to a dinner—or shall we say a lunch?—of roasted acorns. After their feast, some of the young savages began to run and leap about, to show the Englishman what they could do. When Penn was in college at Oxford he had been fond of doing such things himself. The sight of the Indian boys made him feel like a boy again; so he sprang up from the ground, and beat them all at hop, skip, and jump. This completely won the hearts of the red men.

From that time, for sixty years, the Pennsylvania settlers and the Indians were fast friends. The Indians said, "The Quakers are honest men; they do no harm; they are welcome to come here." In New England there had been, as we have seen,[8] a terrible war with the savages, but in Pennsylvania, no Indian ever shed a drop of Quaker blood.

5 Founds: begins to build.

6 Treaty: an agreement; and see paragraph [69].

7 See Rev. i. 11 and iii. 7.