"The story-high house of hewn logs is clean and neat, with many rooms," he wrote, "so that one can be alone if one wishes to." The central room featured a massive stone hearth with trophy heads gazing down from the walls and buffalo robes covering the couches. His own chamber held a rubber tub for bathing and rough shelves for his favorite books--"Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell"--along with a growing assortment of volumes sent from New York by his devoted sister."