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 the stones of the field should be in friendship with them.