The years went by, and a distant city paused in its busy life to hearken to bells tolling for one who lay dead.  Kings and princes walked behind his coffin and a whole people mourned.  Yet in life he had worn no purple.  He was a plain, even a poor man.  Upon his grave they set a rock brought from the island in the North Sea, just like the other that stands there yet, and in it they hewed the letters N.R.F., for the man and the boy were one.  And he who spoke there said for all mankind that what he wrought was well done, for it was done bravely and in love.

Niels Ryberg Finsen was born in 1860 in the Faroee islands, where his father was an official under the Danish Government.  His family came of the sturdy old Iceland stock that comes down to our time unshorn of its strength from the day of the vikings, and back to Iceland his people sent him to get his education in the Reykjavik Latin school, after a brief stay in Denmark where his teachers failed to find the key to the silent, reserved lad.  There he lived the seven pregnant years of boyhood and youth, from fourteen to twenty-one, and ever after there was that about him that brought to mind the wild fastnesses of that storm-swept land.  Its mountains were not more rugged than his belief in the right as he saw it.

The Reykjavik school had a good name, but school and pupils were after their own kind.  Conventional was hardly the word for it.  Some of the “boys” were twenty and over.  Finsen loved to tell of how they pursued the studies each liked best, paying scant attention to the rest.  In their chosen fields they often knew much more than the curriculum called for, and were quite able to instruct the teacher; the things they cared less about they helped one another out with, so as to pass examinations.  For mere proficiency in lessons they cherished a sovereign contempt.  To do anything by halves is not the Iceland way, and it was not Niels Finsen’s.  All through his life he was impatient with second-hand knowledge and borrowed thinking.  So he worked and played through the long winters of the North.  In the summer vacations he roamed the barren hills, helped herd the sheep, and drank in the rough freedom of the land and its people.  At twenty-one the school gave him up to the university at Copenhagen.

Training for life there was not the heyday of youthful frolicking we sometimes associate with college life in our day and land.  Not until he was thirty could he hang up his sheepskin as a physician.  Yet the students had their fun and their sports, and Finsen was seldom missing where these went on.  He was not an athlete because already at twenty-three the crippling disease with which he battled twenty years had got its grip on him, but all the more he was an outdoor man.  He sailed his boat, and practised with the rifle until he became one of the best shots in Denmark.  And it is recorded that he got himself into at least one scrape at the university by his love of freedom.