on the river banks,
keeping them open and beautiful. Could he have foreseen the future, he
would have made the streets wider. He had in mind, however, only a
country town. "Let every house be placed," he directed, "if the person
pleases, in the middle of its plot, as to the breadth way 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."

Among those houses was his own, a modest structure made of brick,
standing "on Front Street south of the present Market Street," and still
preserved in Fairmont Park. He afterwards gave it to his daughter
Letitia, and it was called Letitia House, from her ownership.

In the mean time, he was making his famous treaty with the Indians. Penn
recognized the Indians as the actual owners of the land. He bought it of
them as he needed it. The transfer of property thus made was a natural
occasion of mutual promises. As there were several such meetings between
the Quakers and the Indians, it is difficult to fix a date to mark the
fact. One meeting took place, it is said, under a spreading elm at
Shackamaxon. The commonly accepted date is the 23d of June, 1683. The
elm was blown down in 1810. There is a persistent tradition to the
effect that William was distinguished from his fellow Quakers in this
transaction by wearing a sky-blue sash of silk network. But of this, as
of most other details of ceremony in connection with the matter, we know
nothing.

Penn gives a general description of his various conferences upon this
business. "Their order," he says, "is thus: the king sits in the middle
of a half-moon, and has his council, the old and wise, on each hand.
Behind them, or at a little distance, sit the younger fry in the same
figure." Then one speaks in their king's name, and Penn answers. "When
the purchase was agreed great promises passed between us of kindness and
good neighbourhood, and that the English and the Indians must live in
love as long as the sun gave light, ... at every sentence of which they
shouted, and said Amen, in their way." Some earnestness may have been
added to these assuring responses by the Indians' consciousness of the
fact that the advantages of the bargain were not all on one side. The
Pennsylvania tribes had been thoroughly conquered by the Five Nations.
There was little heart left in them. But their condition detracts
nothing from Penn's Christian