Thoreau writes in his journal:
8 A.M. A clear and pleasant day after the rain. Start for Boon’s Pond in Stow with C. [William Ellery Channing] . . . Hosmer’s man was cutting his millet, and this buckwheat already lay in red piles in the field . . . The lane in front of Tarbell’s house, which is but little worn and appears to lead nowhere, though it has so wide and all-engulfing an opening, suggested that such things might be contrived for effect in laying out grounds . . . What is that slender pink flower that I find in the Marlborough road, – smaller than a snapdragon? . . . We drink in the meadow at Second Division Brook, then sit awhile to watch its yellowish pebbles and the cress (?) in it and other weeds . . . Beyond the powder-mills we watched some fat oxen, elephantine, behemoths,—one Rufus-Hosmer-eyed, with the long lash and projecting eye-ball. Now past the paper-mills, by the westernmost road east of the river, the first new ground we’ve reached . . . And now we leave the road and go through the woods and swamps toward Boon’s Pond, crossing two or three roads and by [John?] Potter’s house in Stow; still on east of river . . . Beyond Potter’s we struck into the extensive wooded plain where the ponds are found in Stow, Sudbury, and Marlborough. Part of it called Boon’s Plain . . . Returned by railroad down the Assabet . . . We sat on the top of those hills looking down on the new brick ice-house.
