The cruel custom of stoning a wren to death on S. Stephen's Day, once generally prevalent, is well-known, and was an obvious endeavour after commemorative realism. At Padstow, in Cornwall, the same scene was enacted less objectionally on the Eve of the Conversion of S. Paul, by the stoning of a pitcher, whence that day was locally known as "Paul's Pitcher Day." The royal offering of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, at the Chapel Royal, S. James's, on the Feast of the Epiphany, was once a ceremony of real dignity, but is now rather a paltry business, interesting chiefly as one of the most curious of survivals. The royal charities on Maunday Thursday, are really a portion of an otherwise lapsed custom, which recalled the action of our Lord on the day before His Crucifixion. Down to the reign of James II. the king attended by some of the great officers of his court, washed the feet of a number of poor people on this day, and then distributed money, food, and clothing among them. The lads of Kendal have a different way of keeping the day; in parties of a dozen or so, they drag, or used to drag, tin cans through the streets, beating them with sticks, until they were quite demolished. Can this, one wonders, be in any way related to that Good Friday custom of Spanish sailors, the beating and hanging in effigy of Judas the Traitor? An old Dorset poet, Barnes, says, referring to a well-known Easter custom: "Last Easter I put on my blue Frock coat, the vust time, vier new; Wi' yaller buttons aal o' brass, That glittered in the zun like glass, Bekaze 'twer Easter Zunday." No good luck can attend you, so the belief was, unless you wear at least one new thing on Easter Day. The fancy probably arose from an idea of the "newness of life" of which the festival speaks to us. Easter eggs again were obviously used at first as supplying a fitting emblem of the Resurrection. As a rule they are simply treated as pretty ornaments, but at Liège, in Belgium, boys have a kind of game with them, similar to an English lad's use of chestnuts, knocking two together; the boy whose egg remains unbroken the longest being proclaimed the conqueror. The subject of holy day practices is an immense one, especially when one wanders into all the bye-paths of local peculiarities. All of them, no doubt, had their meaning in times past, and therefore their use; if some, having now become unintelligible or even foolish forms, drop year by year into disuse, we can scarcely, from mere love of the olden days, regret them. But all the more tenaciously should we cling to those old customs, which have still a living soul in them, still a lesson to teach. Our forefathers, with their ready wit in finding means for impressing truth on the mind through the medium of the eye, showed a deeper knowledge of human nature than some of their sons, who boast so freely of the superior wisdom of the nineteenth century. Church Bells: When and Why they were Rung. BY FLORENCE PEACOCK.