They had also at times simple social meals together. Certain priests of the town, with whom they were connected, and whose character they esteemed without sharing their opinions, were invited to these gatherings. The churchmen ate, drank, and talked with them, and thought themselves fortunate to be invited to these honest men’s houses.[312] This circumstance shows a large-heartedness among these Christian folk of Perth, which could see and appreciate whatever good qualities their adversaries possessed. They did not, however, tie themselves down to the Roman rules about meat-days and fish-days, rules from which exemption may be had for a little money: and one Friday it happened that a goose appeared on their table. Three of these people, Robert Lamb, William Anderson, and James Raveleson, daring characters and given to raillery, were among those who were taken up with Reform on its negative side. They were disgusted at the abuses of the monastic life, and the Franciscans most of all offended them. The sight of one of these mendicant friars in the street, with his brown frock, his girdle of cord, his cowl, and his bare feet, excited in them the keenest aversion. ‘These monks,’ as has been said by a very distinguished Catholic priest, ‘feign chastity, but they know what voluptuousness is, and they often outdo men of the world in luxurious indulgence.’[313] And yet these monks pretend that all that is needed for salvation is to put on a frock of their order at the moment of death. In the judgment of Anderson and of his two friends, the founder of that order, who was nevertheless a better man than most of his successors, must have been the devil himself. They took therefore an image of Francis of Assisi, nailed rams’ horns on the head and hung a cow’s tail behind, and having thus given to it the semblance of a demon, they hung it. The Scots are not jesters by nature. They are on the contrary earnest and energetic towards those whom they oppose; and this blameworthy execution was carried out by these three men with imperturbable gravity.[314] [Sidenote: RAVELESON AND LAMB.]