in public. After some months of private study at Sprendlingen, his father's new parish, Spiess returned to Giessen and successfully passed his examinations in theology, 2 April 1832. Burgdorf, Switzerland After graduation, Spiess became private tutor in the family of the Hessian Count Solms-Rödelheim, at Assenheim. Around this time, on a visit to his family in Sprendlingen, one evening a friendly magistrate informed his father that if Adolf was found in the house on the following morning he would be subject to arrest. Spiess therefore left at once, and reached Assenheim in safety. In 1833, his father read a newspaper notice that the city of Burgdorf, Switzerland, was in search of someone who could take charge of physical training in its elementary school. The clergyman, recognizing that a sojourn in a neutral country was the only safe course for his son, in view of existing political conditions, at once wrote to propose Adolf for the place. Word came in August that Adolf had been appointed teacher of gymnastics, singing, writing, and drawing. (In 1835, geography and history was substituted for writing and drawing.) On 5 October he left home with his youngest brother, Hermann, and traveling by way of Basel reached Burgdorf on the 21st, ready to begin work in the state which was to be his home for the next fifteen (1833–1848). The city authorities had erected a new, attractive, and roomy building for the school, and now placed at its head Friedrich Fröbel, already widely known for his book The Education of Man (1826). Also present were Heinrich Langethal (1792–1879) and Wilhelm Middendorf (1793–1853) who had been associated with Fröbel for fourteen years in his school in the Thuringian village of Keilhau, and after the few years in Burgdorf were again to be his helpers when the first kindergarten was opened at Blankenburg, another Thuringian town. All three had been members of Lützow's Free Corps during the War of Liberation, and through residence in Berlin had come under the influence of Jahn and his work at the Hasenheide Turnplatz. Spiess found these colleagues ready to cooperate with him at every step, and all worked together in perfect harmony to give the broadest possible training to the children under their care. The open-air gymnasium, originally laid out after the Jahn plan in 1824, and beautifully situated in a grove near the left bank of the Emme, overlooked to the