The Hook was ready for us, we were told. The Great Eastern steamer _St. Petersburg_ was there awaiting our arrival, having the night before landed Prince Lichnowsky and the other members of the German Embassy in London. The Kaiser’s emissary had passed to the ship through a British guard of honor, while shore batteries fired an ambassador’s salute. How like Sir Edward Goschen’s slinking departure from Berlin, we thought! Shortly after two o’clock the _St. Petersburg_ lifted anchor and amid typical North Sea weather, raw, rainy and misty, got under way. Few thought of German submarines at that time, but the Berlin Government, we pondered, had not guaranteed Sir Edward Goschen "safe conduct" through an indiscriminately sown field of floating mines. Quite obviously, we had now to pass through a zone bristling with uncertainty, to put it mildly. But we had not steamed far into the open sea before the sight of a British torpedo-boat flotilla on patrol convinced us that we were in a well-shepherded course. Then we had our first ocular demonstration of Jellicoe’s unremitting vigilance, for the crescent of destroyers far forward now began rapidly to close in upon us. Our identity was apparently not known to them, and they were taking no chances. "They sent a shot across our bow yesterday, with the Germans on board," explained the skipper of the _St. Petersburg_ to Captain Henderson, the Naval Attaché, who was with him on the bridge. Captain Henderson was not disturbed by the possibility of our getting an innocuous three-pounder in our wireless rigging or some other harmless token of the destroyers’ solicitude, but he _was_ concerned lest so innocent a craft should cause British destroyer captains to burn up valuable oil fuel needlessly at such an hour. So the next I saw of Henderson he was wig-wagging mysterious messages with signal-flags from the bridge of the _St. Petersburg_, which told the destroyers, I suppose, that we weren’t in the slightest respect worthy of their attention or shell. They wig-wagged something back which must have pleased Henderson, for presently he clambered down smilingly from the upper regions, and said: "_That’s_ all right!"