Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend--into life and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed Ward's injunction and "extended his audience eastward" by going East himself. He "never forgot," we are told, "that advice" of Anson Burlingame: indeed, he acted upon it immediately by associating himself with the "choice and refined party" of the _Quaker City_ excursion which led him to the feet of his future wife. But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward Beecher, the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America. What bread and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly poet in him? "Now here," said he--Mark Twain reports the interview in one of his letters, "now here, you are one of the talented men of the age--nobody is going to deny that--but in matters of business I don't suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do it." And thereupon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed him how to make a contract for "The Innocents Abroad" in which his percentage was a fifth more than the most opulent publishing house in the country had ever paid any author except Horace Greeley. Such were the lessons in self-help this innocent soul received from the wise men of statecraft, literature and divinity. Thus Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age, launched, in defiance of that instinct which only for a few years was to allow him inner peace, upon the vast welter of a society blind like himself, like him committed to the pursuit of worldly success.