plague of which people now speak as the Black Death.

Of all monks and men he was the sweetest and gentlest, and long before
he was chosen Prior, when he had charge of the youths who wished to be
monks, he never wearied of teaching them to feel and care for all God's
creatures, from the greatest to the least, and to love all God's works,
and to take a great joy even in stones and rocks, and water and earth,
and the clouds and the blue air. "For," said he, "according to the
flesh all these are in some degree our kinsfolk, and like us they come
from the hands of God. Does not Mother Church teach us this, speaking
in her prayers of God's creature of fire, and His creature of salt, and
His creature of flowers?"

When some of the brotherhood would smile at his gentle sayings, he
would answer: "Are these things, then, so strange and childish?
Rather, was not this the way of the Lord Jesus? You have read how He
was in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan, and how He was with
the wild beasts? All that those words may mean we have not been
taught; but well I believe that the wild things came to Him, even as
very little children will run to a good man without any doubt of his
goodness; and that they recognised His pitifulness and His power to
help them; and that He read in their dumb pleading eyes the pain and
the travail under which the whole creation groaneth; and that He
blessed them, and gave them solace, and told them in some mysterious
way of the day of sacrifice and redemption which was drawing near."

Once when the brethren spoke of clearing out the nests from the church
tower, because of the clamour of the daws in the morning and evening
twilight, the Novice-master--for this was Oswald's title--besought them
to remember the words of the Psalmist, King David: "The sparrow hath
found an house and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay
her young, even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts."

As for the novices, many a legend he told them of the Saints and holy
hermits who had loved the wild creatures, and had made them companions
or had been served by them in the lonely places of the hills and
wildwood. And in this, he taught them, there was nothing strange, for
in the book of Hosea, it was written that God would make, for those who
served Him, a treaty of peace and a league of love with the beasts and
the birds of heaven and the creeping things of the earth, and in the
book of Job it was said that even t