A Farewell To Dr. Doyle
Farewell Dinner to Conan Doyle is an article published in the New-York Tribune on 8 december 1894.
A Farewell to Dr. Doyle
He Tells The Aldine Club How America Has Impressed Him.
When Dr. A. Conan Doyle reached this country some two months ago the members of the Aldine Club welcomed him, and last evening they gave him a farewell dinner.
Hamilton Mabie, as president of the club, presided and introduced the guest of the evening, whose presence, he said, represented an international affair, because Dr. Doyle was an Irishman by blood, was born in Scotland and spoke English.
Dr. Doyle's remarks were inclined to be of a retrospective character, and, judged from them, his American retrospect is a sincerely pleasant one. He said he felt like a hurdler who had taken all the obstacles, and they were represented by the East, the West, the North and the South of this broad land, but the greensward between would always appear to him as the Aldine Club. It would require the quiet of his study to separate the powerful impressions he had received while in this country. At present they were only a chaotic mass. The panorama which was whirling in his mind contained visions of the Hudson, with its chain of old Dutch towns; a delightful glimpse of the industry of the manufacturing West, and another of Chicago, which reminded him of a half-grown boy who was always outgrowing his clothes. A view of staid old Philadelphia brought back placid memories of rural England, and so he went on describing briefly all the cities he had visited and ended by saying that when he left he should leave a part his heart behind.
Sir Henry Cunningham, the English author, paid a loving tribute to the memory of James Russell Lowell, and other speeches were made by "Bill" Nye, F. Hopkinson Smith, David Christie Murray, the Rev. Dr. Henry van Dyke, Thomas Nelson Page, Frank R. Lawrence, Ripley Hitchcock, Captain J. T. J. H. Doyle, John Burroughs, Noah Brooks, William Cary and others. Some of those present were Samuel S. McClure, William W. Appleton, John Brisben Walker, William W. Eilsworth, Frank H. Dudd, Charles E. Merrill, William R. Howland, John H. Drudy, Frank P. Foster, Joseph I. C. Clarke, Alfred C. Barnes, J. Aspinwall Hodge, jr., Heromich Shugio, Charles J. Mills, Samuel L. Dobbins, Gilman H. Tucker, A. D. Chandler, James Stokes, James B. Pond, F. H. Scott, Albert Shaw, J. Cleveland Cady, Bleecker Van Wagenen, R. H. Robertson, Chalmers Dale, Lawrence F. Abbott, Cyrus H. K. Curtis, Daniel C. Beard, George Wharton Edwards, Edward D. Appleton, Thomas F. Clarke, Alexander W. Drake, Francis L. Hine, David A. Munro, John A. Greene, Walter H. Page and Theodore E. Smith.
