In introducing Mr. Clemens, Frank R. Lawrence, the President of the Lotos Club, recalled the fact that the first club dinner in the present club-house, some fourteen years ago, was in honor of Mark Twain.

I wish to begin this time at the beginning, lest I forget it altogether; that is to say, I wish to thank you for this welcome that you are giving, and the welcome which you gave me seven years ago, and which I forgot to thank you for at that time.  I also wish to thank you for the welcome you gave me fourteen years ago, which I also forgot to thank you for at the time.

I hope you will continue this custom to give me a dinner every seven years before I join the hosts in the other world—­I do not know which world.

Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Porter have paid me many compliments.  It is very difficult to take compliments.  I do not care whether you deserve the compliments or not, it is just as difficult to take them.  The other night I was at the Engineers’ Club, and enjoyed the sufferings of Mr. Carnegie.  They were complimenting him there; there it was all compliments, and none of them deserved.  They say that you cannot live by bread alone, but I can live on compliments.

I do not make any pretence that I dislike compliments.  The stronger the better, and I can manage to digest them.  I think I have lost so much by not making a collection of compliments, to put them away and take them out again once in a while.  When in England I said that I would start to collect compliments, and I began there and I have brought some of them along.

The first one of these lies—­I wrote them down and preserved them —­I think they are mighty good and extremely just.  It is one of Hamilton Mabie’s compliments.  He said that La Salle was the first one to make a voyage of the Mississippi, but Mark Twain was the first to chart, light, and navigate it for the whole world.

If that had been published at the time that I issued that book [Life on the Mississippi], it would have been money in my pocket.  I tell you, it is a talent by itself to pay compliments gracefully and have them ring true.  It’s an art by itself.

Here is another compliment by Albert Bigelow Paine, my biographer.  He is writing four octavo volumes about me, and he has been at my elbow two and one-half years.

I just suppose that he does not know me, but says he knows me.  He says “Mark Twain is not merely a great writer, a great philosopher, a great man; he is the supreme expression of the human being, with his strength and his weakness.”  What a talent for compression!  It takes a genius in compression to compact as many facts as that.

W. D. Howells spoke of me as first of Hartford, and ultimately of the solar system, not to say of the universe: 

You know how modest Howells is.  If it can be proved that my fame reaches to Neptune and Saturn; that will satisfy even me.  You know how modest and retiring Howells seems to be, but deep down he is as vain as I am.