that the Indians would be sure to catch such a good-looking young man as Penn was and eat him.  ‘But, Friend Charles,’ said Penn, ’I mean to buy the land of the Indians, so they will rather keep on good terms with me than eat me.’  ‘Buy their lands!’ exclaimed the king.  ’Why, is not the whole of America mine?’ ‘Certainly not,’ answered Penn.  ‘What!’ replied the king; ’didn’t my people discover it?[4] and so haven’t I the right to it?’ ‘Well, Friend Charles,’ said Penn, ’suppose a canoe full of Indians should cross the sea and should discover England, would that make it theirs?  Would you give up the country to them?’ The king did not know what to say to this; it was a new way of looking at the matter.  He probably said to himself, These Quakers are a strange people; they seem to think that even American savages have rights which should be respected.

[Footnote 4:  Referring to the discovery of the American continent by the Cabots, sent out by Henry the Seventh of England, see paragraph 22.]

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.

[Illustration:  PENN MAKING THE TREATY WITH THE INDIANS.]

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.

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.