d he describes the immense migration of wild pigeons at
that season, and the ducks which flew so low and were so tame that the
colonists knocked them down with sticks.

Most of the winter he spent at Chester and wrote to England in high
spirits of his journeys, the wonders of the country, the abundance of
game and provisions, and the twenty-three ships which had arrived so
swiftly that few had taken longer than six weeks, and only three had
been infected with the smallpox. "Oh how sweet," he says, "is the quiet
of these parts, freed from the anxious and troublesome solicitations,
hurries and perplexities of woful Europe."

As the weeks and months passed, ships kept arriving with more Quakers,
far exceeding the migration to the Jerseys. By summer, Penn reported
that 50 sail had arrived within the past year, 80 houses had been built
in Philadelphia, and about 300 farms had been laid out round the town.
It is supposed that about 8000 immigrants had arrived. This was a
more rapid development than was usual in the colonies of America.
Massachusetts and Virginia had been established slowly and with much
privation and suffering. But the settlement of Philadelphia was like a
summer outing. There were no dangers, the hardships were trifling, and
there was no sickness or famine. There was such an abundance of game
close at hand that hunger and famine were in nowise to be feared. The
climate was good and the Indians, kindly treated, remained friendly for
seventy years.

It is interesting to note that in that same year, 1682, in which Penn
and his friends with such ease and comfort founded their great colony
on the Delaware, the French explorers and voyageurs from Canada, after
years of incredible hardships, had traversed the northern region of the
Great Lakes with their canoes and had passed down the Mississippi to its
mouth, giving to the whole of the Great West the name of Louisiana, and
claiming it for France. Already La Salle had taken his fleet of canoes
down the Mississippi River and had placed the arms of France on a post
at its mouth in April, 1682, only a few months before Penn reached
his newly acquired colony. Thus in the same year in which the Quakers
established in Pennsylvania their reign of liberty and of peace with
the red men, La Salle was laying the foundation of the western empire of
despotic France, which seventy years afterwards was to hurl the savages
upon the English colonies, to wreck the Quaker policy of