§ 57. In the last year of the eighteenth century (1800) Pestalozzi was toiling away, constant to his purpose but not clearly seeing the road before him. In March, 1800, he wrote to Zschokke: “For thirty years my life has been a well-nigh hopeless struggle against the most frightful poverty.... For thirty years I have had to forego many of the barest necessaries of life, and have had to shun the society of my fellow-men from sheer lack of decent clothes. Many and many a time have I gone without a dinner and eaten in bitterness a dry crust of bread on the road at a time when even the poorest were seated round a table. All this I have suffered and am still suffering to-day, and with no other object than the realization of my plans for helping the poor” (R.’s Guimps, 189). It was clear that he could not help others till he himself got help; and he now did get just the help he wanted, an assistant who though a schoolmaster was, strange to say, perfectly ready to learn, and to throw himself into carrying out another man’s ideas. This was Hermann Kruesi, a man twenty-five years old, who from the age of 18 had been master of the village school at Gais in Appenzell. In consequence of the war between the French and Austrians, Appenzell was now reduced to a state of famine, and bands of children were sent off to other cantons to escape starvation. Fischer, a friend of Pestalozzi’s, and himself an educationist taught by Salzmann (_supra_ 289), wrote from Burgdorf to the pastor of Gais, offering to get thirty children taken in by the people of Burgdorf, and asking that they might be sent with some one who would look after them in the day-time and teach them. In answer to this invitation Kruesi, after a week’s march, entered Burgdorf with a troop of little ones. The children were drawn up in an open place, and benevolent people chose which they would adopt. Kruesi was taken into the Castle which the Government had made over partly to Fischer, partly to Pestalozzi. In it Kruesi opened a day-school. Fischer soon afterwards died; and Pestalozzi proposed to Kruesi, who had become entirely converted to his views, that they should unite and together carry on the school in the Castle. By a decree of 23rd July, 1800, the Executive Council granted to Pestalozzi the gratuitous use of as much of the Castle and garden as he needed, and thus was established Pestalozzi’s celebrated Institute at Burgdorf.