HISTORY OF THE KILDARE HUNT 



the operations of a sportsman of that name. Here 

 for a fortnight at a time he would come down from 

 Baltiboys with a pack of foxhounds and a party 

 of boon companions and pass the days in hunting 

 the adjacent country, and the nights in the typical 

 Irish revelry of the period. The fame of these doings 

 still lingers about the district. Mr Percy La Touche 

 talked some years since with an old peasant who 

 remembered them. There were hard riding and 

 hard drinking, card playing and cockfighting, even 

 duels were at times included in the delights of 

 these meetings. " Ah," said Mr La Touche 's in- 

 formant, " thim was the times." 



Another similar establishment was conducted 

 at Castlewarden by a Mr John Maher. He was the 

 younger son of Mr Gilbert Maher, who was a sub- 

 stantial man in the County Tipperary, and for a 

 time supported John in a life of riot and extrava- 

 gance at Castlewarden. Here John Maher kept a 

 pack of hounds and enjoyed the other diversions of 

 the squireen of the period, those men who still live 

 in the pages of Charles Lever, where their doings 

 are recorded with little or no exaggeration. 



Maher kept a blind piper, who played to his 

 guests after dinner. He also retained a tame artist 

 on the premises, who painted only one subject, a 

 sailor saved from a shipwreck in Dublin Bay and 

 sitting on a rock, and with repeated copies of this 



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