Book excerpt: It rains! It rains all over town, pattering congenially on windowpanes and rooftops. From indoors, a child watches, listens, and feels a delicious coziness. It rains on the fields, the hills, the ponds. The streams and brooks, the rivers and seas, surge and swell exuberantly. Tomorrow there will be warm mud to play in, and puddles, and in the puddles "pieces of sky." It pours.This picture book by the winner of the 1969 Caldecott Medal is a lyrical celebration of rain's inspiring effect on Mother Nature--on human nature, too. Its few words and panoramic pictures are buoyant with growth and freshness.