At Burnley, in Lancashire, an old custom prevailed by which all persons married at St. Peter's Church, in that town, paid a fine to the boys at the Grammar School; the money thus obtained being applied, according to the records, for the maintenance of the school library. This custom appears to have been kept up down to the year 1870, about which time Burnley Grammar School was rebuilt, and, on its re-opening, the practice of paying fines to the boys was discontinued. It is a common saying in Lancashire that a bride should wear at her wedding:-- "Something old and something new, Something borrowed, something blue." This saying, and the practice of it, is common in other parts of England; the writer knows a lady who, when married at Bedford, five years ago, carried out the couplet to the letter; on this same bride being brought by her husband to his home in Lincolnshire, at the end of the honeymoon, the custom of lifting the bride over the threshold was observed; the bride and bridegroom got out of the carriage a few yards from the house, and he carried her up the steps, and into the hall. This was formerly a common practice in the North of England, and in Scotland, and is the remains of an old Roman custom which has survived the onslaught of time and change. It was an old custom to strew the path from the house of the bride to the church with sawdust or sand, and so recently as the year 1876 a "sawdust wedding" took place from a house in Sunderland. The custom would originate, no doubt, in a desire to secure a clean path for the bride to walk upon, and this was often ornamented with devices, which would be easily done with either material. "Keeping the doorstep warm" was a custom practised most commonly in the North of England. As soon as the bride and bridegroom had gone away, and the old shoe had been thrown, a servant, or sometimes the guests, would pour a kettle of boiling water over the front doorstep, as an auspice that there would soon be another wedding from the same house--keeping the threshold warm for another bride they called it. In these prosaic nineteenth century days, there is not much attention paid to the selection of the day of the week for the marriage ceremony. Our ancestors had many proverbs and couplets, all more or less pointing to certain and the same day, to avoid or select for the event. Monday for wealth, Tuesday for health, Wednesday best day of all, Thursday for losses, Friday for crosses, Saturday no luck at all. The practice of inserting wedding announcements in newspapers is almost universal, and the addition of "no cards" appears as often as not. Our neighbours on the other side of the Atlantic have, however, quite outdone us by the following addition to a wedding announcement in the _Quebec Morning Chronicle_, of November 7th, 1868:--"No cards. No Cake. No Wine." Burial Customs. BY ENGLAND HOWLETT, F.S.A.