Jahn knew how to vary the exercises and make each one interesting, and the moments of rest were filled with jokes and banter or with stories drawn from history and from his own experiences. Winning thus the respect and love of all his young companions, he was able to overcome the spirit of dissension which at the start was ready to break out on slight provocation, and made harmony and discipline prevail. During the following winter a part of those who had been regular in attendance still held together, and were allowed a share in the indoor exercises of the pupils at Plamann’s school—fencing with light broadswords and shooting at a target with crossbows. This group formed a nucleus for the next year’s work. The spring of 1811 saw Jahn again at the Hasenheide with pupils from the Graue Kloster and Plamann’s school. But now he had a more definite plan in mind. Immediately after school hours on Wednesdays and Saturdays work was begun in an opening in the woods, opposite a few public houses. They first fenced in a rectangular area and built in the background a small hut or arbor where clothing could be left, and then set up within the enclosure their simple apparatus. This comprised a horizontal mast or balance-beam, a rope hung from a yard which was fastened crosswise in the limbs of two trees, a group of horizontal bars made by tying three small fir trunks, at a height of seven feet, to three pines which stood at the points of a triangle, a roughly made inclined ladder, two climbing masts, one fifteen and the other twenty feet or more in height, and two sets of fixed standards for use in high jumping and pole-vaulting. They also made a jumping ditch, and laid out a figure-of-eight track, one circle of which served as a wrestling place. Games were to be played outside the enclosure.