Not long did Tom remain in England. Soon he was off with his regiment to Sicily, at this period garrisoned by British troops, and saved by a strip of inviolate sea from the grasp of the master of Italy. The sojourn in Sicily must have been dull. He was stationed at Syracuse, but his school training had not gone deep enough to interest him in Thucydides's marvellous story of the siege of that place or in the antiquities of Sicily. The chief surviving record of his sojourn in Sicily is an account from his washerwoman, "Mrs. De Lass," dated at Syracuse the 8th of March, 1809. His distaste for the army was now complete. His sister Polly had ended her school days and, by a fortunate circumstance, had gone out to Canada "under the protection of Sir William Johnstone's lady" and to Canada Tom was himself resolved to go. Early in 1810, he was back in Edinburgh, taking a few weeks' holiday with the Kers, resolved to go on half pay at once, if possible, or, failing this, to sell out, and after a delay of fourteen or fifteen months, to go home to Murray Bay. The intervening time he intended to spend in the study of farming; he had almost completed a plan for going into Berwickshire to reside with a farmer and thus equip himself as a land owner. His friends thought him changeable. "The Captain," wrote Ker on the 30th of March, 1810, "is a sweet tempered good young man but he wants steadiness.... I fear that after trying to be a farmer at Murray Bay he may tire and want to return to the army." So serious was Tom about his future bucolic life that he wrote to his sister Christine, as he had written before to his mother, to ask whether she did not think he should look round for a wife; such a companion would be necessary, he thought, if he settled down as a farmer in Canada. We can imagine that the proposition, from a youth of twenty-three, caused some dismay among the occupants of the Manor House at Murray Bay; but Tom was soon professing himself something of a woman hater and he never married.