the ensuing Christmas, as he used to do in former years. These sheriffs were very useful persons in those times, and performed many offices for our olden monarchs that would somewhat surprise a modern high sheriff to perform now, when he is only called upon to attend to the higher duties of his office, and becomes officially one of the first men in his county. Henry the Third, in his twenty-sixth year, directed the sheriff of Gloucester, to cause twenty salmons to be bought for the king, and put into pies against Christmas; and the sheriff of Sussex to buy ten brawns with the heads, ten peacocks, and other provisions for the same feast. [Illustration: James Stephanoff, del. Ashbee & Dangerfield, lith. USHERING IN THE BOAR’S HEAD.] In his thirty-ninth year, the French king, having sent over as a present to Henry (whether as a New Year’s gift or not does not exactly appear) an elephant—“a beast most strange and wonderfull to the English people, sith most seldome or never any of that kind had beene seene before that time,”—the sheriffs of London were commanded to build a house for the same, forty feet long and twenty feet broad, and to find necessaries for himself and keeper. The boar’s head just referred to was the most distinguished of the Christmas dishes, and there are several old carols remaining in honour of it. “At the begynnyng of the mete, Of a borys hed ye schal hete, And in the mustard ye shal wete; And ye shal syngyn or ye gon.” The dish itself, though the “chief service in this land,” and of very ancient dignity—probably as old as the Saxons,—was not confined to Christmas; for, in 1170, when King Henry the Second had his son Henry crowned in his own lifetime, he himself, to do him honour, brought up the boar’s head with trumpets before it, “according to the manner.” It continued the principal entry at all grand feasts, and was frequently ornamented. At the coronation feast of Henry the Sixth there were boars’ heads in “castellys of golde and enamell.” By Henry the Eighth’s time it had become an established Christmas dish, and we find it ushered in at this season to his daughter the Princess Mary, with all the usual ceremonies, and no doubt to the table of the monarch himself, who was not likely to dispense with so royal a dish; and so to the time of Queen Elizabeth, and the revels in the Inns of Court in her time, when at the Inner Temple a fair and large boar’s head was served on a silver platter, with minstrelsy. At the time of the celebrated Christmas dinner, at Oxford, in 1607, the first mess was a boar’s head, carried by the tallest of the guard, having a green scarf and an empty scabbard, preceded by two huntsmen, one carrying a boar spear and the other a drawn faucion, and two pages carrying mustard, which seems to have been as indispensable as the head itself. A carol was sung on the occasion, in the burden of which all joined. Queen’s College, Oxford,