Upon the demise of the old monarch, the title naturally passed to the
White Oak, its neighbor, another of the race of Titans, standing
conveniently near, of whose early history very little is positively
known beyond the fact that it is an old tree; and with the title passed
the traditions and reverence that gather about crowned heads.

Mrs. Stowe has given it a new claim to notice, for beneath it, according
to Drake's Historic Middlesex, "Sam Lawson, the good-natured, lazy
story-teller, in Oldtown Folks, put his blacksmith's shop. It was
removed when the church was built."

The present Eliot Oak stands east of the Unitarian meeting-house, which
church is on or near the spot where Eliot's first church stood. It
measured, January, 1884, seventeen feet in circumference at the ground;
fourteen feet two inches at four feet above. It is a fine old tree, and
it is not improbable--though it is unproven--that it dates back to the
first settlement of Natick.

"Thou ancient oak! whose myriad leaves are loud
With sounds of unintelligible speech,
Sounds as of surges on a shingly beach,
Or multitudinous murmurs of a crowd;
With some mysterious gift of tongues endowed
Thou speakest a different dialect to each.
To me a language that no man can teach,
Of a lost race long vanished like a cloud,
For underneath thy shade, in days remote,
Seated like Abraham at eventide,
Beneath the oak of Mamre, the unknown
Apostle of the Indian, Eliot, wrote