To please Captain Smith, the queen welcomed Pocahontas kindly. She appeared at court in fashionable English clothes,--which must have seemed very uncomfortable to an Indian,--and was presented as the "Lady Rebecca," for since her baptism her name had been changed. Pocahontas spent a few months in England, and she had just started to return to Virginia, when she was taken ill and died. But she left a little son, who lived to grow up and became the ancestor of several noted families in Virginia. [Illustration: Wives for the Virginians.] The colonists soon found tobacco so profitable that they planted it even in the streets of Jamestown, and used it for money. Instead of saying a thing was worth so many dollars, as we do now, they said it was worth so many pounds of tobacco. They rapidly grew rich, and as they no longer feared starvation, all longed to have wives to make them comfortable. They therefore wrote to England, asking that women should be sent out to them, offering to give from one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco to pay for their passage. The next ship, therefore, brought over a cargo of young women, and the men who wanted wives rushed down to the wharf, and wooed them so eagerly that there were soon many happy homes in Virginia. As tobacco crops rapidly exhaust the soil, the colonists occupied more and more land, settling generally near a stream, so that vessels could come and load at their private docks. And because tobacco is planted, and not sown, their lands were called plantations, a name still used in the South for any large farm. Some people, however, say the name was given to any settlement planted in a new place. To make sure they would always have a good government, the Virginia planters, who in 1619 had eleven settlements, or boroughs, chose two men from each borough to sit in a House of Bur´ges-ses at Jamestown. These burgesses helped to make a set of laws, called the "Great Charter." The fact that the colonists now had a share in ruling themselves, made them take special pride in their new homes, although they still spoke lovingly of England as the "mother country." Strange to relate, the same year that the Virginia colonists claimed their right as freemen to help govern themselves, a Dutch ship brought twenty negroes to Jamestown, and sold them as slaves. But although these were the first colored people in our country, they were not the first or only slaves, for the king had already sent out a number of convicts and homeless children to serve the colonists. There was always a great difference between white and colored slaves. White men were sold only for a certain length of time, after which they again became free; but the negroes were sold for good and all, and they and their children were to be slaves forever. XXVII. HUDSON AND THE INDIANS.