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facile journey. There were no roads between the two states;
consequently, it was a fifteen-day trip by horseback to get
to and from school.
An old army sergeant, writing his memoirs, remembers
meeting three students coming from Tuxtla towards Ocozo-
cuatla; it was in the month of December of 1871. The
sergeant remembered being tired, discouraged and in rags.
He greeted the students and they went their separate ways.
Soon one of them returned and gave him some money; the stu­
dent's name was Emilio Rabasa.^ Throughout his life,
incidents such as this show Emilio to be a man responsive to
other men's needs. Serra Rojas points out that a desire for
the betterment of the human race was to what Rabasa dedi­
cated himself, that is: "se redujo a un largo deseo; su
IT
ideal por la justicia de los hombres."
Rabasa is to remember these trips to and from home
and his school days in an autobiographical poem written in
188U:
Con doce primaveras
Y llorando las lagrimas primeras,
Deje el paterno hogar triste y doliente,
La bendicion llevando de mi padre,
Y de mi pobre madre
Amargo beso en la abatida frente.
"^Jose Maria Montesinos, Memorias del sargento. . .
1866-1878 (Tuxtla Gutierrez, 1935), 198.
17 ^
Andres Serra Rojas, "Prologo," in Emilio Rabasa La
constitucion y la dictadura, l*th ed. (Mexico City, 1968), xlii.