What pleasure and satisfaction Penn must have taken in planning how this new town should be built! He outlined it very carefully, directing where the markets and storehouses should be placed, and telling his agents to choose a site in the center of the line of houses facing the river for his own residence. "Let every house be placed," he suggested, "if the person pleases, in the middle of its plat, as to the breadth of it, that so there may be ground on each side for gardens, or orchards, or fields, that it may be a green country town, which will never be burnt and always wholesome." From that comes the name of "Penn's green country town" that was so often applied to Philadelphia in the early years of its existence. Penn sent a special letter to the Indians. "Now the great God hath been pleased to make me concerned in your part of the world," he wrote them, "and the King of the country where I live hath given me a great province therein; but I desire to enjoy it with your love and consent, that we may always live together as neighbors and friends; else what would the great God do to us who hath made us (not to devour and destroy one another, but) to live soberly and kindly together in the world?" Penn was now such a prominent figure in England, the owner of a great tract of land given him by the king, that he was able to help those Quakers who got into trouble with the government; and when he was not busy planning his colony, he was usually helping some persecuted members of his faith, and urging them to join him in his new province where liberty in religion was to be the keynote. He also drew up a constitution for Pennsylvania, and then, in the summer of 1682, he was ready to set sail for his new domain. [Illustration: PENN'S SEAL. WILLIAM PENN PROTECTOR AND GOVERNOR OF PENSYLVANIA MERCY JUSTICE] CHAPTER VIII FIRST VISIT TO PENNSYLVANIA The proprietor of the new province sailed from Deal, in England, on August 30, 1682, leaving his wife and children at their home in the country. His ship was the _Welcome_ and carried about one hundred passengers. The voyage across the Atlantic took nearly two months, for it was the 24th day of October when the _Welcome_ sighted the capes of the Delaware. During the voyage thirty of the passengers died of smallpox, a common sickness for a ship to carry in those days. The _Welcome_ took three days to sail up the Delaware to New Castle, which was the chief settlement thereabouts. This place was in the territory that had been granted to Penn by the Duke of York, and here the agents of the duke gave the title to the land to its new owner in their master's name by the old ceremony of "turf and twig and water," a custom long continued in Pennsylvania, and which meant that the former owner, by giving the new owner a piece of turf, a bit of twig, and a cup of water, transferred to him full possession of whatever was to be found on the land in question.