Late in December of 1809 Jahn arrived in Berlin, where, as he says, love for the fatherland and his own inclination led him again to teaching. Disappointed in his original idea of finding a position in the new Berlin University, and failing to receive a promised head mastership at Königsberg when the results of his faulty school and university training became apparent, he at first received some private pupils, and the next Easter entered a training school for teachers (the _Königliche Seminar für gelehrte Schulen_). He also began to give instruction in history, German, and mathematics at the _Gymnasium zum grauen Kloster_, the school from which he had run away fifteen years before. This position he retained for a year and a half, until Christmas, 1811, and in the meantime he had been given some classes in Dr. Plamann’s flourishing Pestalozzian School for Boys. It was the custom at the Graue Kloster for teachers to spend some of the Wednesday and Saturday half-holiday afternoons outdoors with pupils of the lower classes. In the spring of 1810 Jahn began to make this his practice, meeting the boys from time to time outside the Halle and Kottbus gates for games and simple exercises like running, jumping, and wrestling, or going farther south with them to the _Hasenheide_, a hilly and wooded stretch of unused land on the southern slope of the Spree valley, and to the adjoining _Rollberge_ and the _Tempelhofer Berg_. Older scholars were welcomed whenever curiosity and inclination tempted them to join the band, and the numbers rapidly increased from week to week. They played at “Black Man,” or at “Robber and Traveler” (afterwards known as “Knight and Townsman”), using a fowler’s hut for the robbers’ den and the foot of an oak as the city or castle from which the travelers set forth. The first apparatus, furnished by Jahn, was a pair of light poles tipped with iron points so that they could be thrust into the sand, and a rope with a sandbag at either end, which was placed across the top as a barrier to be jumped over. Long, straight sticks were used like spears for hurling at any mark that might be chosen. The limb of an oak, their first horizontal bar, sufficed for hanging exercises and for attempts to draw themselves up by the arms. Preparatory jumping exercises, borrowed from GutsMuths, were occasionally practised. One afternoon Jahn went on foot with ten or twelve boys as far as the _Britzer Heide_, to the southeast, where they had a game together and then walked back. The report of this first _Turnfahrt_ (gymnastic excursion) roused the desire for others of a similar sort.