HISTORY OF THE KILDARE HUNT 



always wore, and said to the boy, " Who are you, 

 and what do you know about Jostler? " " I'm John 

 Watson," repHed the boy, " and that's Sir Richard 

 Butler's Jostler, wherever you got him." Such was 

 the beginning of a great friendship between the two 

 families of Watson and Kennedy. 



One more story of the period has reached me. 

 Old Mr Wall of Knockrigg used often to praise the 

 sport shown by Mr Kennedy, and to illustrate the 

 length of the runs would say that he often put on a 

 new pair of breeches in the morning and they had 

 to be darned in the evening. 



All Kildare men congratulated Mr John Ken- 

 nedy in July of 1836 when King William IV 

 created him a baronet. It remains for me now to 

 give some facts from Sir John's diary, already men- 

 tioned, which will, I think, speak very eloquently 

 of the sport he provided during twenty-six seasons, 

 the diary itself covering twenty-four of those 

 seasons. 



I find that in those twenty-four winters the 

 hounds actually ran on 1,240 days, in which they 

 found 2,734 foxes, of which they killed 859. There 

 was thus an average of two finds a day, with three 

 finds on every fifth day, during a quarter of a cen- 

 tury. Those fond of statistics will note that the 

 proportion of foxes killed to those found gives an 

 average of one to three and one-fifth; in other 

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