Cogolin is not the capital of the Golfe country, that honour belonging to Grimaud, of which St. Tropez is virtually the port; still, Cogolin is quite a little metropolis, and is the centre of the liveliest happenings of all the region between Hyères and Fréjus. The town has two different aspects, one banal and modern, and the other picturesque and feudal, recalling the thirteenth-century days of the Grimaldis, who built the château of which the present belfry formed a part. Cogolin is uninteresting enough in its newer parts, but as one ascends the slope of the hill on which the town is built it grows more and more picturesque until, when the lower town is actually lost sight of, it finally takes rank as a delightful old-world place, with scarce a note of the twentieth century about it, where they still bring water from the public fountain and most of the shops of the smaller kind transact their business on the sidewalk--where there is one. There is a peculiar odour all over Cogolin, which comes from the manufacture of corks and queer-looking “whisk-brooms.” It’s not a bad or unhealthful smell, but it is peculiar, and many will not like it. From Cogolin all roads lead to the heart of the Maures, and the stream of carts loaded with great slabs of cork is incessant. Here, as in many other parts of Les Maures, the manufacture of corks is an industry which furnishes a livelihood to many. The workrooms of the cork-makers, to attract clients or amuse the populace--the writer doesn’t know which--are often in full view from the street. Certainly it is amusing to see a workman stamp out, or cut out, the corks and drop them into a waiting basket, as if they were plums gathered from a tree. In the larger establishments, where the work is done by machinery, the process is more complicated, and less interesting, and the writer did not see that any better results were obtained. The whole region of Les Maures is dominated by the _chêne-liège_, or the cork-oak. Usually they are great, straight-trunked trees with a heavy foliage. Some still possess their natural brown trunks, and some are a gray fawn colour, showing that they are already aged and have been many times robbed of their bark for the manufacture of floats for the fisherman’s nets and corks for bottles. The first coat which is stripped has no mercantile value, and the trunk is left to heal itself as best it may, the sap oozing out and forming another skin, which in due time forms the cork-bark of commerce. The trees are stripped only in part at one time, else they would perish. The first marketable crop is gathered in ten or a dozen years, and it takes another decade before the same portion can be again obtained.