The country was torn up at that time by a struggle between people and government over constitutional rights, and it had reached a point where a country parish had refused to pay taxes illegally assessed, as they claimed.  It was their Boston tea-party.  A delegation of the “tax refusers” had come to Copenhagen, where the political pot was boiling hot over the incident.  The students were enthusiastic, but the authorities of the university sternly unsympathetic.  The “Reds” were for giving a reception to the visitors in Regentsen, the great dormitory where, as an Iceland student, Finsen had free lodging; but it was certain that the Dean would frown upon such a proposition.  So they applied innocently for permission to entertain some “friends from the country,” and the party was held in Finsen’s room.  Great was the scandal when the opposition newspapers exploited the feasting of the tax refusers in the sacred precincts of the university.  To the end of his days Finsen chuckled over the way they stole a march on the Dean.

For two or three years after getting his degree he taught in the medical school as demonstrator, eking out his scant income by tutoring students in anatomy.  His sure hand and clear decision in any situation marked him as a practitioner of power, and he had thoughts once of devoting himself to the most delicate of all surgery,—­that of the eye.  He was even then groping for his life-work, without knowing it, for it was always light, light—­the source or avenue or effect of it—­that held him.  And presently his work found him.

It has been said that Finsen was a sick man.  A mysterious malady[1] with dropsical symptoms clutched him from the earliest days with ever tightening grip, and all his manhood’s life he was a great but silent sufferer.  Perhaps it was that; perhaps it was the bleak North in which his young years had been set that turned him to the light as the source of life and healing.  He said it himself:  “It was because I needed it so much, I longed for it so.”  Probably it was both.  Add to them his unique power of turning the things of everyday life to account in his scientific research, and one begins to understand at once his success and his speedy popularity.  He dealt with the humble things of life, and got to the heart of things on that road.  And the people comprehended; the wise men fell in behind him—­sometimes a long way behind.

[Footnote 1:  The autopsy which he himself ordered on his death-bed as his last contribution to medical knowledge, showed it to be a slow ossification of the membrane of the heart, involving the liver and all the vital organs.  He was “tapped” for dropsy more than twenty times.]

In the yard of Regentsen there grows a famous old linden tree.  Standing at his window one day and watching its young leaf sprout, Finsen saw a cat sunning itself on the pavement.  The shadow of the house was just behind it and presently crept up on pussy who got up, stretched herself, and moved into the sunlight.  In a little while the shadow overtook her there, and pussy moved once more.  Finsen watched the shadow rout her out again and again.  It was clear that the cat liked the sunlight.