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.
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.
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