icate, sweet-scented pink bells from the moss with gentle appeal,
"long overlooked, lowly, flowering early" despite cold and storm,
typical of the man himself.

NIELS FINSEN, THE WOLF-SLAYER

Hard by the town of Thorshavn, in the Faroee islands, a little lad
sat one day carving his name on a rock. His rough-coated pony
cropped the tufts of stunted grass within call. The grim North Sea
beat upon the shore below. What thoughts of the great world without
it stirred in the boy he never told. He came of a people to whom it
called all through the ages with a summons that rarely went
unheeded. If he heard he gave no sign. Slowly and laboriously he
traced in the stone the letters N.R.F. When he had finished he
surveyed his work with a quiet smile. "There!" he said, "that is
done."

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 ins