"Ah!" he said, "you are new to our Landes."
"And these gashes down the trees--these, monsieur, give us the harvest of the Landes."
"Ay, resin," said an old fellow with a blouse and a quick eye; "resin, monsieur; the only harvest that man can grow in sand."
"_Tenez_," said my first interlocutor; "the peasants cut that gash in the tree; and at the root they scoop a little hollow in the ground. The resin perspires out of the wood, flows slowly and glutinously down the gash, and in a month or so, according to the heat of the weather, the hole is full, and the man who rents the trees takes up the sticky stuff, like soup, with a ladle."
"That's a very good description," said the old bloused gentleman. "And then, sir" (addressing me), "we barrel our crop of the Landes. Yes, indeed, we barrel it, as well as they do the crop of the Medoc."
"Only you wouldn't like to drink it so well," said the Bordeaux man.
Presently we pulled up at a station--a mere shed, with a clearing around it, as there might have been in Texas or Maine. I observed the name--TOHUA-COHOA, and remarked that it did not look like a French one.
"French one!" said he of Bordeaux; "you don't expect to find French in this chaos? No, no; it is some of the gibberish the savages hereabout speak."
"No such gibberish, and no such savages either," said the little keen-eyed man. "_Moi, je suis de Landes_; and the Landes language is a far finer language than French. French! phoo, phoo!"
And he took a pinch of snuff indignantly and triumphantly. The Bordeaux gentleman winked blandly at me, as if the keen-eyed man was a character to be humoured, and then looked doubtful and unconvinced.
"Tohua-Cohoa," he said; "it has a _sacré tonnerre_ of a barbarous sound; has it any meaning?"
"Meaning!" exclaimed the man of the Landes; "I should think so. Tohua-Cohoa means, in French, _Allez doucement_; and the place was so called because there was there a dangerous swamp, in which many a donkey coming up from Teste with fish to you of Bordeaux was smothered; and so it got to be quite proverbial among the drivers of the donkeys, and they used to shout to each other, 'Tohua-Cohoa!' whenever they came near the slough; meaning to look out, and go gently, and take care of the soft places."