I shall never forget those Sunday dinners. The food was plain, but daintily cooked, and the Professor’s conversation was a feast in itself. He had a wonderful power of putting professional matters from his mind when he left his study, and coming out ready to enter into any kind of merrymaking. He used to sit with sparkling eyes, telling story after story, while we laughed at his sallies until we could laugh no more.
I never knew his wit to fail him. I remember being present at a meeting of the Academy of Science, in Philadelphia, at which he was up for re-election to the office of recording secretary, and was defeated. Among others, Professor William Moore Gabb made some remarks against him. Cope’s only defense was “Now, William, more gab!”
I attended also the dinners which he gave to his hosts of friends in the city, and the luncheons at which Mrs. Cope entertained the young men to whom the Professor gave lectures in his own home. He told his funniest anecdotes on these occasions, and used to call on me for my story of the old farmer who, while at work hoeing corn in a stump-field on the side of a hill, saw a hoop-snake at the top take its tail in its mouth and begin to roll down towards him. Springing behind a stump, he struck at it with his hoe handle, into which the sting at the end of the snake’s tail entered deeply. In less than an hour the handle had swelled up to the size of a man’s leg.
I believe that this story-telling of which he was so fond was for Cope a form of relaxation from his heavy work in the study, and that his ability to give himself up so thoroughly to it in his leisure hours was what enabled him to accomplish in his life an amount of work such as few men have ever accomplished. It would take a volume even to name the titles of all the products of his industrious brain. One of them alone, the great Volume III of the “Tertiary Vertebrata,” often called “Cope’s Bible,” has over a thousand pages of text, beside many fine plates. It was published by the Government, in 1884.
Before starting back to outfit another expedition to the Kansas Chalk, I secured the services of Mr. Russell T. Hill, an able young man who was working in the Academy under the Jesup Fund; and upon our arrival at Manhattan, I hired Mr. A. W. Brouse as teamster and cook.