Dr. Doddridge's famous Colonel Gardiner came to reside in Minister Carlyle's parish, and told the story of his remarkable conversion, with his own lips, to the clergyman. The hook which turned him from his wicked career was Gurnall's "Christian Armor," a volume placed many years before, by a mother's hand, in his trunk, and until then neglected. Young Carlyle hoard Gardiner tell the story of his change of life several times to different sets of people, and he thought Doddridge had marred the tale by introducing the incident of a blaze of light, which the Colonel himself never spoke of having seen, when he related his conversion.
When Alexander was eleven years old, he took a little journey with his father and another clergyman by the name of Jardine; and the two pious, elderly gentlemen, having a great turn for fun and buffoonery, made sport wherever they went. Turning their wigs hind-part foremost, and making faces, they delighted in diverting the children they encountered on the way.
Of many of the incidents of the Porteous Mob young Carlyle was a witness. He was in the Tolbooth Church, at Edinburgh, when Robertson, a condemned smuggler, who was brought in to listen to the discourse and prayers before execution, made his escape. The congregation were coming into church while all the bells were ringing, when the criminal, watching his opportunity, sprang suddenly over a pew, and was next heard of in Holland. When, a few weeks afterwards, Wilson, another smuggler, was executed, Carlyle, with some of his school-fellows, was in a window on the north side of the Grass-Market, and heard Porteous order his guard to fire on the people. A young lad, who had been killed by a slug entering his head, was brought into the house where the boys were on that occasion.
In the summer of 1737, young Carlyle might have been seen during the evening hours walking anxiously about the Prestonpans fields. That season he had lost one of his fellow-pupils and dearest friends, and they had often agreed together that whichever might die first should appear there to the other, and reveal the secrets beyond the barrier. And so the survivor paced the meadows, hoping to meet his old companion, who never appeared. In November of that year he was at college, and his acquaintance with Robertson, afterwards the eminent historian, then began. John Home, celebrated at a later period as the author of "Douglas," also became an intimate friend. He now decided to choose a profession, and had wellnigh concluded an agreement with two surgeons to study theirs, when he became disgusted with the meanness of the doctors, who had bought for dissection the body of a child of a poor tailor for six shillings, the price asked being six shillings and sixpence, from which they made the needy man abate the sixpence. Turning from the niggardly surgeons, he enrolled his name as a student of divinity, and was frequently in Edinburgh attending the lectures at Divinity Hall. Wonderfully cheap was the living in those days, when, at the Edinburgh ordinaries, a good dinner could be had for fourpence, small beer included. John Witherspoon, years after a member of the American Congress, then a frank, generous young fellow, was a companion of Carlyle at this period, and they often went fishing together in the streams near Gifford Hall.