Hastings Clive has toys, the wooden and earthen toys for which Benares was ever famous among Indian children,--nondescript animals, and as non-descript idols,--little Brahminee bulls with bells, and artillery camels, like those at Rohilcund and Agra,--Sahibs taking the air in buggies, country-folk in hackeries, baba-logue in gig-topped ton-jons. But much more various and entertaining, though frailer, are his Calcutta toys, of paper, clay, and wax,--hunting-parties in bamboo howdahs, on elephants a foot high, that move their trunks very cunningly,--avadavats of clay, which flutter so naturally, suspended by hairs in bamboo cages, that the cats destroy them quickly,--miniature palanquins, budgerows, bungalows, and pagodas, all of paper,--figures in clay of the different castes and callings, baboos, kitmudgars, washermen, barbers, tailors, street-waterers, box-wallahs, (as the peddlers are called,) nautch-girls, jugglers, sepoys, policemen, doorkeepers, dog-boys,--all true to the life, in costume, attitude, and expression. Statedly, on his birth-day, the Anglo-Indian child is treated to a _kat-pootlee nautch_, and Hastings Clive has a birth-day every time he conceives a longing for a puppet-show; so that our wilful young friend may be said to be nine years, and about nineteen kat-pootlee nautches, old. To make a birth-day for Hastings Clive, three or four _tamasha-wallahs_, or show-fellows, are required; these, hired for a few rupees, come from the nearest bazaar, bringing with them all the fantastic apparatus of a kat-pootlee nautch, with its interludes of story-telling and jugglery. A sheet, or table-cloth, or perhaps a painted drop-curtain, expressly prepared, is hung between two pillars in the drawing-room, and reaches, not to the floor, but to the tops of the miniature towers of a silver palace, where some splendid Rajah, of fabulous wealth and power, is about to hold a grand _durbar_, or levee. All the people, be they illustrious personages or the common herd, who assist in the ceremony, are puppets a span long, rudely constructed and coarsely painted, but very faithful as to costume and manners, and most dexterously played upon by the invisible tamasha-wallahs, whom the curtain conceals.