Did not Jesus, the Virgin, the disciples live on bread bestowed?
Was it not rendering a great service to those to whom they resorted to teach them charity?
Francis in his poetic language gave the name of _mensa Domini_, the table of the Lord, to this table of love around which gathered the _little poor ones_.

The bread of charity is the bread of angels; and it is also that of the birds, which reap not nor gather into barns.
We are far enough, in this case, from that mendicity which is understood as a means of existence and the essential condition of a life of idleness.

It is the opposite extreme, and we are true and just to St.
Francis and to the origin of the mendicant orders only when we do not separate the obligation of labor from the praise of mendicity.[4] No doubt this zeal did not last long, and Thomas of Celano already entitles his chapters, "_Lament before God over the idleness and gluttony of the friars_;" but we must not permit this speedy and inevitable decadence to veil from our sight the holy and manly beauty of the origin.
With all his gentleness Francis knew how to show an inflexible severity toward the idle; he even went so far as to dismiss a friar who refused to work.[5] Nothing in this matter better shows the intentions of the Poverello than the life of Brother Egidio, one of his dearest companions, him of whom he said with a smile: "He is one of the paladins of my Round Table." Brother Egidio had a taste for great adventures, and is a living example of a Franciscan of the earliest days; he survived his master twenty-five years, and never ceased to obey the letter and spirit of the Rule with freedom and simplicity.
We find him one day setting out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Arrived at Brindisi, he borrowed a water-jug that he might carry water while he was awaiting the departure of the ship, and passed a part of every day in crying through the streets of the city: "_Alla fresca! Alla fresca!_" like other water-carriers.

But he would change his trade according to the country and the circumstances; on his way back, at Ancona, he procured willow for making baskets, which he afterward sold, not for money but for his food.

It even happened to him to be employed in burying the dead.
Sent to Rome, every morning after finishing his religious duties, he would take a walk of several leagues, to a certain forest, whence he brought a load of wood.