Everything about the locks was in extremely good repair. Even the great agate and onyx mosaic of the name KAISER WILHELM KANAL, set between the double-headed eagles of the Imperial arms, was swept and polished to display it to best advantage. The locks were only the front window display, however, for the badly eroded banks of the canal itself testified to the same lack of maintenance as the railways were suffering from. As our pilot reported that the revolutionists had spent the night obliterating all the Imperial names--such as _Kaiserstrasse_ and _Kronprintzstrasse_--in Brunsbüttel, one felt safe in assuming that the gaudy mosaic on the lock wall had been furbished as a decoration, not as a symbol. The _Hercules_, having been raised to the proper level, was locked out into the canal, along which she proceeded at the steady six-knot speed laid down as the limit not to be exceeded by ships of her size. Although of considerably less displacement than a number of the largest of the German capital ships, she was of greater draught than any of these, and even the burning of several hundred tons of coal in the voyage from Rosyth still left her drawing slightly more than the thirty odd feet that the German naval command had set as the limit. This had been figured out in advance, however, and an oiling all round of the destroyers before leaving Wilhelmshaven had brought her up just the few inches necessary to making the passage without inflicting injury to herself or to the canal. The _Hercules_ had traversed about a mile of the canal before the _Viceroy_ was locked out to follow in her wake, and something like that interval was preserved throughout most of the passage. The _Verdun_ kept about a quarter of a mile astern of the _Viceroy_, with the _Regensburg_--but so far back as to be out of sight--bringing up the rear. Two squat patrol launches--one on either quarter, a couple of hundred yards astern--followed the _Hercules_ all the way, but for just what purpose we could not make out. For the first few miles the country on either side of the canal was of the same low-lying nature as that through which all of our railway journeys from Wilhelmshaven had been made. Ditched and dyked marshland alternated with stretches of bog and broad sheets of stagnant water where the drainage system had proved unequal to carrying off the overflow in the inundations following the winter rains. Cultivation was at a standstill here, probably until the water-logged soil dried out in the spring. Like the East Frisian peninsula, the region was essentially a grazing rather than an agricultural one, and the farmers were paying the penalty of having broken up grassland that was only dry enough for cultivation during a few months of the year. Cattle were scarce, sheep scarcer, and such of the inhabitants as were visible around the dismal farmsteads had the dull, purposeless air of people with nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in.