He was not pen-urious; but paid the natives for their lands. Peace, Penn, and plenty prevailed through all the borders of the baby settlement. In two years, twenty-five hundred wood-colored bonnets and broad-brims could be counted of a Sunday in the loving city. Unlike most of the other young settlements, the neck of land between the two rivers on which Penn’s pet stood was not wrung by famine or by the hand of political oppression. In March, 1683, Penn granted to the assembly, held in the growing town, an ample charter of liberty. The next year he made a trip to Europe, taking the “Philadelphia line,” which, fortunately for him, did not break before he reached shore. In 1691 the three counties, now forming the State of Delaware, and of which Penn had procured a conveyance, took it in their heads to try their own luck at housekeeping, and set up a separate kitchen of their own. Penn wished them pot-luck; and off they went in high glee, cultivating their own Pea Patch and sowing their own oats to their heart’s content. The next year Penn was deprived of his government and shut up in prison for two years. For some time William and Mary, it was supposed, had a taste for his head served up _à la_ John the Baptist; but this dish was at last thought to be too expensive for the English constitution, and so the ruffles around Penn’s neck were untroubled. In 1699 Penn again visited his North American estate, took an account of stock, gave presents of all the political privileges they asked for, and went home again, for the last time, in high feather. Meanwhile the young colony leaped vigorously over into the eighteenth century, found its supply of anthracile coal sufficient for a good house-warming, invited over Dutch, Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes, with their large horses, heavily tired wagons, and never-tiring heavy wives, who settled down on the whole territory so solidly that neither they nor it could ever be moved from that day to this. CHAPTER VIII. THE COLONIES IN THE UPPER HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.