It is a magnificent relic of the profuse hospitality of former times. Richard the Second heightened its walls and added its noble roof of British oak, which shows the excellence of the wood carving of that period. Although Sir Charles Barry has shortened the Hall of its former proportions to fit it as a vestibule to the New Houses of Parliament, it is still a noble and spacious building, and one cannot walk through it without in imagination recalling some of the Royal Christmases and other stately scenes which have been witnessed there. The last of these festal glories was the coronation of George the Fourth, which took place in 1821. This grand old hall at Westminster was the theatre of Rufus's feasting and revelry; but, vast as the edifice then was, it did not equal the ideas of the extravagant monarch. An old chronicler states that one of the King's courtiers, having observed that the building was too large for the purposes of its construction, Rufus replied, "This halle is not begge enough by one half, and is but a bedchamber in comparison of that I mind to make." Yet this hall was for centuries the largest of its kind in Europe, and in it the Christmas feasts were magnificently kept. After a reign of thirteen years the vicious life of William Rufus met with a tragical close. His dead body was found by peasants in a glade of the New Forest with the arrow either of a hunter or an assassin in his breast. Sir Walter Tyrrel, a Norman knight, who had been hunting with the king just before his death, fled to Normandy immediately afterwards, and was suspected of being a regicide. The body of Rufus was buried in Winchester Cathedral. CHRISTMAS IN THE REIGN OF HENRY I.