te in the Conservative
interest.

Sommerset Cloudesly occupied a large but neat brick house on the verge
of our town's liberties, with a meadow-like lawn in front, and acres
of orchard in the rear. His father had been a small farmer, who
bettered his fortune by all manner of money-making speculations--the
last of which, a cider-manufactory, and a mill, together with a house
he had built, the orchard he had planted, and a handsome strip of
landed property, descending to his only son, made him the second man
in Tattleton. Sommerset had been what is called carefully educated:
ten years of his life had been spent in the house of a clergyman, who
received select boarders as part of his own family; five more at a
college in Oxford under the direction of a staid tutor; and the
residue in a series of fidgets through the house and land left him by
his father; for at the time of our story, the worthy cider-maker had
long gone to his account.

Sommerset was a tall, thin, genteel-looking man, in his thirtieth
year. Motherless, sisterless, and wifeless--strange to say, under such
circumstances, he was restless too. It was not a weight of crime that
pressed upon his conscience. Cloudesly's life had been as harmless as
those of his own apple-trees. It was not inordinate ambition that
disturbed his days, for though, like most of us, Sommerset would have
rather preferred being a great man, could greatness be easily come at,
he lost no labour in its pursuit. Neither was it love that besieged
his peace; for, except Miss Lily Prior, old Tom the brewer's daughter,
who sat in the same pew at church, Sommerset had never been known to
look on one of womankind with attention. Perhaps the carefulness of
his education might have done it. Life could not be entirely folded up
like a napkin, and put into its proper drawer; and everything annoyed
Sommerset Cloudesly. The coming off of his waistcoat button was the
destruction of Messina. The world was going to ruin if his horse lost
a shoe. Like the idle family in the Eastern tale, he could draw a
disturbance from the future also, and many a heart-quake had he
regarding what might happen. His Oxford tutor had made him a strong
Tory; old Cloudesly had averred, that was the only politics for a
gentleman; and though Sommerset believed in all the alarms of his
time, his faith being particularly strong for terrors, he had always
supposed himself to be somebody. Sir Jonas and the Earl of Lumberdale
assur