Richardson, who served as both Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare during the Nixon Administration, was talking about the negotiations for a Law of the Sea treaty, which came to a virtual conclusion last week after six years of deliberations.
The 180-page document, with more than 300 articles and eight annexes, definitively covers every conceivable issue dealing with the seas, from the definition of what constitutes an island to the jurisdiction over fish that live in fresh water but spawn in the ocean.
In the winter of 1879, James Lecky, exchequer clerk from Ireland, and privately interested in phonetics, keyboard temperament, and Gaelic, all of which subjects he imposed on me, dragged me to a meeting of a debating society called The Zetetical: a junior copy of the once well known Dialectical Society founded to discuss John Stuart Mill’s Essay on Liberty when that was new.
The resounding success of the Curacao experiment whetted the appetites of Florida livestock raisers for a similar feat that would relieve them of the scourge of screw-worms.
The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher，Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it connects.
A gang of men, under the direction of their energetic and likeable foreman, 25-year-old Phineas P. Gage, was working on a new line of the Rutland and Burlington railroad.
“I remember thinking, ‘No. No. It’s not Jackson, it’s not my husband, it’s not my Jackson,’” she said. “But it was. He was lying in the street, right across from our house. The police said a man shot him over a parking space.”
I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father，sister, teacher were among them — words that were to make the world blossom for me, “like Aaron’s rod, with flowers.”