For the keeper the days and nights spent in his rearing-fields pass
in incessant anxiety. He never counts his pheasants before they are
hatched. He may count them as morsels of fluff; when they begin to use
their babyish wings; again when they fill the broad ride with a mass of
seething brown--but not until the bracken is dead, and the trees are
naked, and the game-cart has borne away its burden, does he count them
as his own. Nor does his anxiety cease until the long tails hang safely
in his larder.
* * * * *