Under the old system each individual works by himself, deprived of the sympathy and energy evoked by music and the associated movement.” For three years, 1864-1867, Dr. Lewis conducted at Lexington, Massachusetts, a school for girls, in which Theodore Dwight Weld, once the confident advocate of manual labor as a system of exercise, was a leading teacher, and Catharine Beecher was for a time one of the lecturers.[234] In September of 1867 the school building was burned, and although temporary quarters were at once secured in a summer hotel at Spy Pond the project was abandoned at the close of another year. The number of pupils rose to 140 in the third year, drawn from all over the country, and nearly 300 were enrolled during the whole period. In the words of Dr. Lewis, “The character of the announcement, with what the public knew of my interest in physical education, drew together a company of bright girls, with delicate constitutions, such girls as could not bear the exclusively mental pressure of the ordinary school.... The girls went to bed at half-past eight every evening. They rose early in the morning and went out to walk, which walk was repeated during the day. They ate only twice a day, and of very plain, nourishing food. They took off their corsets. They exercised twice a day, half an hour, in gymnastics, and danced an hour about three times a week. This was the general course, and upon this regimen they rapidly improved. The gymnastic exercises proved invaluable, but the nine hours in bed, I believe, played a still more important part.” The Eastman biography states that “On entering the school pupils were measured about the chest, under the arms, about the waist, and around the arm and forearm. The average gain for eight months was in chest measure, two and a half inches; waist measure, five inches; size of arm, one and a half inches; of forearm, about one inch. The work was so hard that with all this remarkable development the weight of the pupils was often lessened.”