He was very reticent of biographical recollections; yet I recall that he well remembered a certain field, through which we walked in Concord, a good distance from the village, to which he used to drive his cow, with bare feet, like the other village boys. He did not dwell on the past. I am confident he rarely read a book over twice, and he loved not to repeat a story after its first freshness. His talent was onward, vigorous, in the moment, which was perfectly filled, and then he went to the next with great speed.
       But I doubt not he loved to linger in mind over the old familiar things of boyhood; and he occasionally let fall some memory of the "Mill Dam" when he was a boy, and of the pond behind it, now a meadow. Of the many houses in which he lived (for his was a very moving family), I heard him rarely speak: that one, now torn away, at the corner of the slaughter-house street (Walden Road); another, where the Library now stands (the Parkman house), farther towards the railroad; and still another which had been "fixed over" for more aspiring villagers than the Irish, who succeeded the Thoreaus in the Parkman house. Three of these mansions he passed in his daily walks to the Post Office, a duty he fulfilled after the death of his father, for the benefit of his family,—for he was a martinet in the family service,—but I never heard him say more than, "I used to live in that house," or, "There it was that so-and-so took place"; thus refreshing his memory by the existing locality. In the year before he built for himself at Walden his only true house, he assisted in making a house in that western part of the village called "Texas," not far from the River. To this [p. 400] spot he was always much attached; it commended an excellent view toward the southwest, was retired, and he had planted a small orchard there.
       — Ellery Channing, in F. B. Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years (Boston: Badger, 1909), II, 400-401.