When it rains in New Orleans — a soft, warm, laughing spring rain that makes the violets in the borders blink and gurgle — there are old people who will tell you that the rain sings. Not just a song of glistening marshes and dripping magnolias and rising bayous, nor a song of dancing feet and frilled skirts and young frolicking. But a song which hearts learn to sing, in the fullness of time — a song which rises like slow smoke from the heavy ashes of experience, fanned by the winds of perplexity.

It is a whimsical old tale, and it begins away back in 1745, when New Orleans houses were built of cypress, four to a square, with ditches all around to drain off surface water — to this day there are aged Créoles who refer to a square as an "islet."

It was in that year that a new monk came to the Capuchin monastery, and took his turn at celebrating the Mass in the parish Church of Saint-Louis. Père Dagobert he was, tall and handsome and debonair as any noble at the Court of France. There was a swing of assurance to him which along at the first caused a faint ripple of astonishment among the younger male parishioners, and a sense of apprehension among the older ones. Could it be quite all right, this twinkle in the young priest's eye, as he cast a glance over his flock at the moment of beginning his sermon?

There were no reservations among the members of that early congregation. They worshiped God wholeheartedly, entrusting to their priest every secret of their isolated existence.

This young Capuchin from France — surely he was not a day over twenty-five!