The _Hercules_ went into her lock at Brunsbüttel an hour before midnight. The _Regensburg_, which had preceded her through the canal, was already in the adjoining lock, and in attempting to pass on the light cruiser _Constance_ and three British destroyers at the same operation the canal people made rather a mess of things. There was a savage crashing and tearing of metal at one stage, followed by a considerable flow of profanity in two languages. When, the next morning in the Bight, a signal of condolence was made by the _Hercules_ to one of the destroyers following in her wake on the "messy" state of its nose, the reply came back. "Don't worry about my nose. You ought to see the _Regensburg_. I've got a piece of her side-plating on my forecastle!" That was the second time the unlucky _Regensburg_ had come to grief in locking through at Brunsbüttel with the ships of the Allied Naval Commission. Owing to the fog, the Germans were unable, or unwilling, to send a ship to take off their pilots from the _Hercules_ and escorting destroyers after the outer limits of the mine-fields had been passed, and it became necessary as a consequence to carry them on to Rosyth. The change of air and food incidental to their personally conducted tour to Scapa (to await the next German transport home) was evidently a by no means disagreeable prospect to them, judging by the way they took the news. The steward who reported that the pilot he was looking after had been "stowing away grub like he expected a long continuance of the blockade," may have stumbled upon the reason for their philosophic attitude. We found the Firth of Forth as we left it--wrapped in fog. There was just enough visibility to make it possible to find the gates in the booms and the main channel under the bridge. The historic voyage came to an end when the _Hercules_, after tying up to the _Queen Elizabeth's_ buoy for a few hours, went into the dry dock at two-thirty in the afternoon of the 20th. The Commission left for London the same evening in a special train provided by the Admiralty. THE END Transcriber's Notes: Simple typographical errors were corrected. Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. Spelling in "dialect" passages not changed. German nouns printed in lower-case have not been changed to upper-case. Inconsistently-spaced abbreviations have not been changed. The following three typographical errors were corrected by referencing a later edition of this book: Page 90, paragraph ending: "Liverpool or Liverpool?" ended with a comma and closing quote. Page 144 "the latter being" was printed as "the later being". Page 287: "model cities" was printed as "model cites". End of Project Gutenberg's To Kiel in the 'Hercules', by Lewis R. Freeman