Henry Baird Favill, AB, MD, LL.D., 1860-1916, a ... - University Library

TRIBUTES AND RESOLUTIONS 13
distinction. There was that in his features, the lineaments
of his countenance, his form and bearing, which set him
apart from other men, and stirred deeply the imagination.
"In physical appearance he seemed of another age, an
age more virile and heroic, who by some chance had strayed
out of his own time and natural environment, into our own
commonplace day, and the conventional life of a great
modern city.
There was revealed in his face a calm confidence which
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stamped him as a master of circumstances, never their
creature. That our eyes shall never be gladdened again
by the sight of that man, so exceptional in his physical
attributes, is in itself no little loss.
"But it was the knowledge that we had of the spirit
within, which caused the peculiar shock which his death
wrought; for the spirit of the man was as rare as the form
which embodied it. We have heard to-day of his activities
in his profession, in civic affairs, and in the care of the poor
and the afflicted. They were only the more obvious manifestations
of an unremitting, but not vocal, sympathy for
his fellow men. At the bottom of it all was this fact, he
was a rare friend of his fellow men.
"He became to many of his patients much more than a
minister to bodily ailments. To which of us who knew him
did the news of his death not bring instant thought of homes
to which his death would mean not merely the loss of a
physician, but of a wise counsellor in the most intimate
affairs of life. We knew that it struck at many as though
a sustaining prop had suddenly fallen away from the structure
of their lives. They leaned upon his strength from day
to day and from year to year.
"His civic work gratified no personal ambition, nor did
he find in it any of the excitement of the game. It was a
burden assumed by an overburdened man, because of his
desire to serve his fellow men, and to better the conditions
under which they lived. He brought to it a courage which