After travelling with George Fox over the Continent upon religious service, and after finding all hopes of liberty crushed at home, Penn in 1681 resolved to cross the Atlantic, and in America to realize the bright dreams which had entertained his imagination from a boy--dreams of “a free Colony for all mankind.” He landed on the banks of the Delaware, to try “the holy experiment.” Tradition tells of his receiving the enfeoffment of the territory, by delivery of earth and water to him, as he stood surrounded by Swedes, Dutch, and English, in the Court House of the Colonial town of Newcastle; and of his ascending the river, fringed with pine trees, to the spot where was to rise the City of Philadelphia, and of his treaty with the Indians under the autumn-tinted elm tree of Shakamaxon. “We meet,” he said to his new neighbours, the red-complexioned children of the forest, “on the broad pathway of good faith and good will, no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love. I will not call you children, for parents sometimes chide their children too severely; nor brothers only, for brothers differ. The friendship between you and me, I will not compare to a chain, for that the rains might rust, or the falling tree might break. We are the same, as if one man’s body were to be divided into two parts, we are all one flesh and blood.” Never had there been in the wild regions of the earth such colonizing as that before. “We will live,” said the red men, “in love with William Penn and his children, as long as the moon and the sun shall endure.” God was the sole witness of that covenant. Its only memorials were the strings of wampun which these covenanters hung up in their huts, and the shells they counted over upon a piece of bark; yet whilst other treaties amongst civilized Europeans have been torn into shreds as soon as they have been sealed, this has remained inviolate. “We have done better,” could the Colonists say, “than if, with the proud Spaniards, we had gained the mines of Potosi. We may make the ambitious heroes whom the world admires, blush for their shameful victories. To the poor dark souls round about us we teach their rights as men.” Penn visited the natives in their cabins, partook of their roasted acorns, laughed and played with the frolicksome, and spoke to them of God. “The poor savage people believed in God, and the soul, without the aid of metaphysics.” The infant city, the Philadelphia, which in 1683 “consisted of three or four little cottages,” grew and spread, hollow trees were succeeded by houses. The chestnut, the walnut, and the ash were cut down for the use of the emigrants, roads were made, boys and girls played in the streets of this new Jerusalem, and the kindly-hearted Quaker, with his genial good-humoured face, with his broad-brimmed hat, his long neckcloth, and his drab attire, might be seen patting their heads with fatherly love.