The Barberry bush Author:Susan Coolidge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ANGELS UNAWARES. |HE early spring of our North America is a fickle and unscrupulous season. Sharp contrasts delight her ; sudden changes are her peculiar joy.... more » To follow warm days with cold blizzards; to tempt the unwary out, minus overcoats and galoches, and then overwhelm them with a worse than January rigor; to run the temperature up and down the gamut of degrees from zero to midsummer heat, — seems to afford a peculiar satisfaction. And when, as sometimes happens, her victims drop by scores into untimely graves, behold this hypocritical early Spring officiating as chief mourner, with a mist of tears, a face as sweet as one of Raphael's Madonnas, and hands heaped with votive blossoms. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that three elderly and highly pecunious gentlemen of New York, who left that city on a morning in April under skies of tender blue-gray, suffused with golden sunshine, should have found themselves at half-past seven of the same evening struggling in a snow-bank in the outskirts of the little village called Pot Haven. Of them it might truly be said that, " going out to shear, they came back shorn." Their errand, a secret and informal conference with a financial magnate who chanced to be spending a week at his country-seat, had to do with one of those mysterious redistributions of a great railroad property, which puts money into the pockets of a few rich men and takes it from a myriad of poor ones. All had gone successfully, and chuckling over the idea of the coming coup, they had turned their horses' heads city-ward; for tempted by the beauty of the weather, they had driven out in a light open trap belonging to the younger of the three, only to find a snow-storm under way and steadily increasing. The wind 'was intheir faces, the sleet fierce and cutting ...« less