If fifty personal barbers should be considered superfluous, what can be said for the four thousand gardeners who looked after the palace gardens, and the several hundred cooks in the royal kitchens? The Nawab was also a man of sporting tastes: he kept a thousand dogs trained for hunting, and 300,000 fighting cocks and pigeons. One of his favourite sports, introduced by a certain Colonel Mordaunt, was the racing of old women in sacks. The Nawab said he had never found anything so enjoyable.
