Not less unaccountable, and yet impressive, are some of the superstitions connected with marriage, death, and the departure of friends. A belief very generally prevails that when a couple enter a church to be married, if the bride steps at all in advance of the bridegroom, he will be found an unwilling and unfaithful husband; while if the opposite should happen to be the order of precedence, even by a few inches, the marriage tie will prove a happy and long-enduring one. The belief that the bridal hour should occur during clear weather, is perhaps a natural one, and derived from well-understood natural laws affecting the physical systems of those entering into such intimate relations; but the superstition goes further and considers sunshine on the bridal day a specific against all the possible ills of matrimonial life. This feeling supplies half of a doggrel couplet which came to us from the Saxons, and which blends marriage and burial somewhat singularly:-- "Happy is the bride that the sun shines on; And blessed is the corpse that the rain rains on." There are thousands of persons who have objections to counting the number of carriages at a funeral, from the superstition that the one who does so will very soon be called to attend a funeral at home; and the same objection exists to putting on, even for a moment, any portion of a mourning garb worn by another, under the impression that the temporary wearer will in some way be influenced to wear mourning very soon for some lost relative. No doubt fifty other and similar superstitions connected with death and burial might be adduced, even without alluding to those of more frightful import and now very little regarded, which belong more peculiarly to the Eastern world, and which inculcate the leaving open of a window at the moment of death, to allow the unrestrained flight of the passing soul, and reprobate the leaving of any open vessel of water in the vicinity of the death-chamber, in the fear that the disembodied spirit, yet weak and untried of wing, may fall therein and perish!