ill further there was a stand of bookshelves which was
beginning to be crowded with books bought one by one as they came out,
or as Duncan felt the need of them. Literature was the young man's only
extravagance, and that was not a very expensive one.

"Welcome! Help yourself! Read what you like and you won't disturb me."
That was the spirit of his greeting to all these his friends whenever
they entered his door, and it was not long before the room of the young
Virginian became a center of good influence among the young men of the
town.

How greatly such an influence was needed the bank officers and other
"solid" men of the city well knew and strongly felt. Few of them ever
thought of reading anything themselves except the commercial columns of
the newspapers, but they had reasons of their own for recognizing the
good work Guilford Duncan was quietly doing, by cultivating the reading
habit among their clerks.

Cairo was an ill-organized community at that time. The great majority of
its people were "newcomers," from all quarters of the country, who had
as yet scarcely learned to know each other. War operations had filled
the town for several years past with shifting crowds of adventurers of
all sorts, who found in disturbed conditions their opportunity to live
by prey. There were gambling houses and other evil resorts in dangerous
numbers, where soldiers and discharged soldiers on their way through the
place were tempted to their ruin by every lure of vice and every ease of
opportunity to go astray.

The solid men deplored these conditions, but were as yet powerless to
better them. After the rush of discharged soldiers through the town
ceased, the evil influences began to operate more directly upon the
clerks and other young men of the city itself. Some who had begun life
there with every prospect of worthy careers had sunk into degradation
through vicious indulgence. Others who still managed to hold their
places in business and to do their work tolerably were manifestly
falling into habits that darkened their futures. In two or three
instances young men of good bringing up, who had earned enviable
reputations for diligence and good conduct, were lured into the gambling
dens, robbed there, and at last were tempted to defalcations and even
sheer robberies of the employers who trusted them. In one conspicuous
case a youth who had won special regard among the better people by the
tender care he was taking of his mother,