“A very promising sweet young man,” was the renewed judgment of his business-like guardian upon Tom in 1803, when he was a boy of only sixteen.  By that time, it was thought that Tom had exhausted the advantages of the Edinburgh High School.  The Edinburgh accent of the day did not suit the taste of his fastidious guardian, who hoped that in an English school a better manner of speech might be acquired.  Tom’s cousin and companion, Alick Ker, a boy a few years older, was going to school at Durham and thither also went Tom.  The lads “are the greatest friends in the world,” wrote his watchful aunt; “Alick does not know how to exist without Tom but Tom is more independent of Alick, for he is not so shy.”  In an aunt’s, perhaps partial, view Tom was quicker and showed more application than Alick.  “Tom advances with great deliberation in his height,” she writes, which was very convenient, for, since Alick was older, Tom came in for Alick’s out-grown clothes and this saved expense.

When the boy’s school days were drawing to an end his future course was the topic of much discussion.  Tom’s father had wished him to study law, though not to practice it:  in Canada, he thought, there was no lucrative opening for any one trained in the law unless he was made a judge.  Old Malcolm Fraser, Tom’s adviser after his father’s death, would have had him, for safety’s sake, adopt a civilian life; he was the last male of his house and therefore ought not to be exposed to a soldier’s dangers.  Tom’s Edinburgh friends wished him to become a Writer to the Signet or, at any rate, to learn something about business since, as a landed proprietor, he must be a man of affairs.  But the youth took the matter in his own hands.  For his father’s character and career he had always a great reverence; soldier’s blood was in his veins, and nature had her way.  Tom became a soldier and, when the school days are ended, we find the boy, not yet eighteen, Lieutenant in the 10th Regiment of Foot.  Fraser wrote to Tom protesting against what he had done and from Maldon Barracks, in Essex, on April 5th, 1805, Tom answers his godfather’s objections.  Perhaps to add solemnity to his argument the old man had assumed the tone of a valetudinarian and Tom replies:  “I would fain hope you had no reason for saying you would soon follow my dear Father.  I hope God will spare you to us since he has thought proper to take my Father to Himself.  Your loss would be irreparable, I having no other person to protect my mother and sisters as I have chosen a line of life in which I may never have the fortune of being near them.”  In spite of Fraser’s appeal, Tom’s resolution to remain in the army was unshaken.