Early in June this first _Turnplatz_[43] was opened. Each boy was assessed fourteen groschen (thirty-three cents) to meet the expense of keeping grounds and apparatus in condition; but Jahn evidently advanced much of the original cost himself, and he granted free admission to any boys of good character who were unable to pay the light charge. Meanwhile the attendance had increased to eighty or a hundred, and later in the summer it rose to two hundred. A friend of Jahn’s came with many of his pupils from the _Friedrich-Wilhelms- und Werder’schen Gymnasium_, and two other teachers brought boys from the Schindler’schen Orphan Asylum. Seeing the need of a special suit for the exercises, Jahn appeared one day clad in long trousers and a short jacket of gray unbleached linen, a costume so cheap and durable that its use soon became general on the Turnplatz, and an enemy of the turners was in the habit of referring to them later as “the unbleached rascals.” All distinctions of rank and class disappeared with the adoption of this uniform costume. Lunches consisted of bread and salt, or of bread and butter and eggs, and pure spring water was the usual drink. Tobacco and brandy, together with all sweetstuffs, were forbidden. Tuesday and Friday afternoons were added to the usual half-holidays during the months of July and August. Besides the games, wrestling, in which Jahn was himself uncommonly proficient, retained its popularity in spite of the new apparatus. There was no wooden horse as yet, but one day Friedrich Friesen, a fellow teacher with Jahn at Plamann’s school, showed them how to vault from the rear and the side to a seat on the thick end of the balance beam. The exercises were not yet orderly or organized, but every boy was an inventor and shared the result with others, learning from them in turn. It was hardly in Jahn’s nature to be systematic, and such a thing as a formal school of gymnastics was foreign to his purpose. The essential thing was the active, wholesome, common life in the open air, and especially the games, training the boys to work together in harmony, and he sought also to kindle in them a public spirit which might some day be of service to the nation. With the approach of winter all movable apparatus at the Hasenheide was stored away, and now Jahn and his oldest pupils began to read eagerly whatever they could find on the subject of physical training, studying with special care the books of GutsMuths and Vieth. [Illustration: FIG. 17.—Jahn’s Hasenheide _Turnplatz_, from a contemporary print (1818).]