"It was a regular den, and typical of Roosevelt to the last degree," a student of those times has said. "He had his gun there and his fishing rod, and often spoke of using them. He was noted for trying to get at the bottom of things, and I remember him well on one occasion when I found him with a stuffed bird in one hand and a natural history in the other, trying to decide if the description in the volume covered the specimen before him." When Roosevelt graduated from college, he was one of a very few that took honors, and the subject of his essay was natural history. How his love of natural history continued will be shown later when we see him as a ranchman and hunter of the West.