Prisoners working on the land--mostly Russian--were more and more in evidence as we neared the Kiel end of the canal. The majority of them still wore their army uniforms, but otherwise there was little to differentiate them--a short distance away at least--from the native peasant labour. None of them appeared to be under guard, and in many places they were working side by side with German farm hands of both sexes. At a number of points I saw Russians lounging indolently in groups consisting mostly of Germans (several of which included women) that had gathered along the banks of the canal to watch us pass, and two or three times I observed unmistakable Russian prisoners (or perhaps ex-prisoners) walking arm-in-arm and apparently in animated conversation with German girls. They seem quite to have taken root in the country. Indeed, the pilot of the _Viceroy_ for the first half of the passage through the canal--he was a Schleswig man, strongly Danish in appearance and probably in sympathies--assured me that the Germans had had the greatest difficulty in getting Russian prisoners to leave the country at all, and that there had been frequent "desertions" from trains and boats whenever it had been attempted. This may well have been true, though--with labour in Germany as much in demand as it was throughout the war--I doubt very much if a great deal in the way of repatriation of Russians had ever been attempted. [Illustration: KIEL DOCKYARD FROM THE HARBOR] With the towns and villages increasing in size and number as we came to the fertile rolling country toward the Baltic end of the canal, evidences multiplied that the population expected our coming and that, directly or indirectly, they had been instructed to adopt a "conciliatory" bearing. In the farming region toward the North Sea end their bearing had been more suggestive of indifference than anything else; but in the crowds that came down to line the railed "promenades" along the banks an ingratiating attitude was at once apparent. Some of these people, of course, were of Danish extraction and probably sincere, especially a number who waved their hands from well inside their doorways, as though to avoid being observed by their neighbours; but for the most part it was the same nauseating exhibition we had already seen repeated so often at railway stations all over the North Sea littoral.