east by wooded sandstone cliffs beyond the stream and on the west by an ancient castle, was now doubled in size and entirely refitted in accordance with the wishes of the new teacher. In the castle itself, where Pestalozzi had conducted his school for five years (1799–1804) and written How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801), a hall was equipped for winter use. In the spring of 1834 the boys of the school, including even the youngest, began to receive systematic instruction in gymnastics for two successive hours on three afternoons of each week, and before long the interest of the girls, also, was awakened and special classes were formed and suitable exercises devised to meet their needs. There were frequent excursions on foot into the surrounding country. Once a year, in the autumn, an exhibition () was held. The new discipline, which reached pupils of both sexes and all ages, was regarded as an essential part of their school training. It was not long before the attention of the cantonal school authorities was attracted to the Burgdorf experiment, and as a result Spiess received in 1835 the added appointment of teacher of gymnastics in the normal school () ten miles away at Münchenbuchsee where he had about 100 pupils and a model school of 80 children. Spiess took on similar tasks at various other schools in the neighborhood, among them a school for girls in Kirchberg. For his own pleasure and further training, he joined a small gymnastic society of men () in Burgdorf, visited the Turners in Bern and Hofwyl, and attended the annual Swiss Turnfeste held in Bern (1839), Basel (1841), and Zurich (1842). Spiess found that the material and methods of Jahn's Deutsche Turnkunst were not sufficient for his needs. Little by little he began therefore to develop and test new groups of exercises, first of all what he called "Free Exercises," or those which require either no apparatus at all, or only such as can be carried in the hands. They were intended to secure ready control and graceful carriage of the body under ordinary conditions, while the pupil was standing or walking on the usual supporting surface, and differed in this particular from the forms commonly practised on the old Turnplatz. To instruct large numbers of pupils at once in these free exercises, he developed marching exercises (), by means of which the entire class