The arrival and departure of Allied prisoners of war was one of the most interesting features of the week in Kiel. The most of these were British--picked up by one or another of the destroyers at this or that port touched at--but there was one large party of French, from a camp near Kiel, and several Belgians, Serbs, and Italians from heaven knows where. These were all made as comfortable as possible in the _Hercules_, and dispatched to England in the next mail destroyer. Except for a man now and then who was suffering from a neglected wound, they were in fairly good condition, a fact, however, which did not lessen their almost rapturous enjoyment of the heaping pannikins of "good greasy grub" (as one of them put it) that was theirs for the asking at any hour of the day they cared to slip up to the galley. Their delight in the band, in the ship's kinema, in "doubling round" for exercise in the morning, in anything and everything in the life in this their halfway station on the road home was a joy to watch. Some of the British prisoners came from the same towns or counties as did men of the ship's company, and the exchange of reminiscences often went on far into the night. Passing across the flat between the ward-room and the commission-room late one evening, I heard a Lancastrian voice from a roll of blankets on the deck protesting to a bluejacket in the hammock above that "Jinny X----" of Wigan didn't have yellow hair when he (the owner of the voice) used to know her, and that, in fact, he'd always thought her rather a "shy 'un." "Thot was afore she worked in a 'T.N.T.' fact'ry," replied the "hammock," with an intonation suggesting that he felt that was sufficient explanation of both changes. A good deal of rivalry developed between the four escorting destroyers in the matter of picking up prisoners, and to hear their officers discussing their "bags" or "hauls" when they foregathered at night in the ward-room of the _Hercules_ reminded one of campers drifting in at the end of the day and yarning of the ducks they had shot and the fish they had caught. "If we could have waited another half-hour twenty more were coming with us," claims _Venetia_. "But even with those," replies _Vidette_, "you would not have been anywhere near our sixty-nine." It was this latter "bag," indeed, which proved the record one of the "season," both in numbers and "quality," for it consisted entirely of non-commissioned officers from a camp near Hamburg. [Illustration: H. M. S. "HERCULES" AND H. M. S "CONSTANCE" IN KIEL LOCKS]