NEWTON, Mass. - The smell of bacon and eggs still hung in the air as five people joined hands with her in a circle and began to pray deeply.

Despite early morning rain, it was shaping up to be a brilliant graduation day for the Rev. Toni DiPina on the campus of Andover Newton Theological School just outside of Boston.

After more than three years of study, the St. Louis native was getting her master's degree in divinity.

The prayer came after breakfast inside her cramped student apartment on one of the oldest training grounds for preachers in the country. It was meant to thank God for this incredible blessing.

But there was another presence two weeks ago inside the tightly bound circle.

"Oh, Lord," DiPina began in a stream of consciousness, eyes closed and nodding deeply. "I pray for that little baby, Lord, out there who is just beginning this life that you've given him."

It was a petition directly to God for a recently abandoned child of St. Louis: a naked newborn boy found under a pile of grass clippings and weeds in a trash bin.

DiPina had read about him in the newspaper after he was found in an alley last month.

"I pray for his mother, Lord," DiPina continued in her circle. "Give her the strength to come forward. Give her the strength to seek help, Lord. She needs help, and you know it."

This praying woman more than 1,000 miles away from St. Louis says this child deserves to know who else was tethered to his umbilical cord hours before he was found.

A CHILD FOUND

There was another baby breathing life into DiPina's prayer on graduation day: a tiny 9-month-old girl in a blue-checked dress who was abandoned in St. Louis 45 years ago. DiPina will never forget what happened to that baby, also mysteriously forsaken in the weeds.

Former St. Louis policeman George Leuckel, now 73, vividly remembers the evening call on May 26, 1963. He drove his patrol car to the decaying grounds of Vandeventer Place, a once stately neighborhood of mansions just west of Powell Symphony Hall. By then the mansions were gone and the only remnant of grandeur was a crumbling circular drive.

"In the middle of all this brush and bushes and junk, sitting on a clean blanket was this baby who was perfectly dressed," he recalled. "She was looking at me, and didn't cry. And I'm looking at her. And I'm thinking, 'What in the world?'"

They hit it off immediately: this young white police officer and this tiny black girl. At City Hospital No. 2, Leuckel said, the baby refused to leave his arms.

He took her to his police precinct to write his report.

"I remember the sergeant telling me, 'Put the baby down,' and I wouldn't put her down."

To be a black, abandoned child in St. Louis in 1963 presented few opportunities for adoption.

"I've got five daughters," Leuckel said. "The thought had crossed my mind to take her home, but there was no way you could do that back then."

He drove the baby in his patrol car to a temporary foster home. He never saw her again.

A CHILD OF THE SYSTEM

On July 16, 1963, the baby was legally placed into the cradle of the former St. Louis City Division of Children's Services, according to social service records.

The city's juvenile court system gave her a calculated birth date estimated by a doctor's measurement of her tiny skull - and a legal name: Antoinette Baker.

Social workers placed her with a woman in her mid-60s who had made a living out of caring for 24 foster children over 34 years.

Antoinette grew into a little girl in the company of three older foster boys whom the woman favored. Antoinette was the trouble-maker.

The foster mother told Antoinette she was a throwaway and had been abandoned inside a cardboard box. She said Antoinette would probably die by the time she was 20.

Social workers unfairly labeled Antoinette. One estimated her IQ at 70. Another described her as not appearing "to me to be an attractive or appealing child."

They also knew something wasn't right in the gloomy house. The curtains were drawn, and the mother spent her time in a chair in the living room, never leaving the home. They worried about the woman's eyesight. But they did not know she had accidentally rubbed a homemade medicine for her arthritis in her eyes. Terrified to leave the home, she refused to go to a doctor, and went blind.

New social workers came and went. Almost every one of them thought the girl needed to be placed elsewhere "from this extremely controlling environment," because "soon the personality damage will be irreversible." But nothing was ever done.

At night, Antoinette was haunted by dreams of a crying young child. Michael Booker, one of her foster brothers, now says those cries were real. They were from a malnourished boy who died in the home.

The mother held firm beliefs on religion and education. The home had books and Bibles and an endless supply of National Geographics and comics that transported the children to other places. A bookmobile came to the neighborhood weekly, and the children had library cards.

The children also spent every Sunday at St. Philip's Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Inside that sanctuary, Antoinette reveled in stories of underdogs and rescuers: Daniel in the lion's den, and the daughters of a priest and a pharaoh who went down to the mucky reeds to pluck baby Moses from the river.

Her church gave her another gift. Nina Lewis, a nearly lifelong counselor with the St. Louis Public Schools, took an interest in the girl who wouldn't sit still in the pews, talked when she shouldn't and stood on tiptoe.

Nina had no children of her own. She began taking Antoinette to all the storied places in the city: the Zoo, the Symphony, the opera.

When the girl was 10, the foster mother decided to retire, and case workers began looking for a new home for Antoinette. The case worker was shocked when Antoinette said she wanted to be adopted. No one had ever asked.

In January 1973, at the social worker's urging, the Post-Dispatch ran a "Sunday's Child" story on "Angela," a pseudonym for Antoinette, complete with a photo of her gazing into the polar bear cage at the St. Louis Zoo.

Four months later Antoinette and the social worker purchased a two-piece knit outfit and set out to a Burger Chef to meet a potential adoptive family. It was a match.

In June, she moved in with her new family as the adoption process started. Lewis was not told where she went. The system believed foster children would do better by making a clean break.

"I didn't get to see her again," recalled Nina Lewis, now 76. "And that was something I just had to accept."

A CHILD SINGS

But as abruptly as Antoinette left the foster care system, she was back. In November, a social worker wrote in Antoinette's file that she had found a new foster family for the girl.

The meticulously documented 93-page file includes no mention of the adoptive family, nor of the alleged physical and sexual abuse the young Antoinette said she suffered in those five intervening months.

Her salve became a dog-eared copy of Maya Angelou's autobiographical narrative, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." Antoinette would spend her later teens immersed in track and field at Beaumont High School, clinging to the praise of her teachers, while moving from foster home to foster home.

When she was 16, she asked a social worker to take her to the vacant lot where she had been abandoned.

The lot was still vacant - as it remains today, spotted with gray tree trunks rising from the tall grass like skinny tombstones. The lot sits 50 yards from the St. Louis City Family Court, where the guardianship of the most recent abandoned baby boy will one day be decided.

Antoinette eagerly surveyed the lot, but saw nothing.

She realized the weeds were never going to provide her with a satisfying answer to the agonizing riddles of her life. Who were her parents? Why had she been abandoned? Who was she?

It was a defining moment. Antoinette knew she had to move on.

"It was not going to break me," Toni DiPina recalled nearly three decades later. DiPina, the former Antoinette Baker, had made a choice to succeed.

AT HOME IN THE WORLD

By the time DiPina aged out of foster care at age 18 with little more than some trash bags of clothes and a tiny TV, she had been through 16 social workers and lived in seven foster homes.

Over the next five years, she graduated from Beaumont High School, attended one year of college at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and lived in homeless shelters before working as a manager at Church's Chicken.

Then she saw an advertisement in the newspaper looking for a nanny for a family of five young boys in rural New England. She realized it was her way to a college degree. On a cold day in October 1987, DiPina flew to Boston in a tan, cotton, striped suit.

"There are not a lot of people who would want to sign up for five kids under 12," said Mary Cadwallader, the mom of the now-grown boys who met a shivering DiPina at Logan Airport that fall day. "I kept saying, 'There are five boys here,' and she didn't blink."

With her earnings, DiPina took night classes at Worcester State College and earned a degree in English in 1991. She married, moved to Rhode Island, adopted two children, worked for two insurance companies and divorced.

But four years ago, she listened to an inspirational sermon by her pastor, David Mitchell, leader of the Congdon Street Baptist Church in Providence, R.I.

"It gnawed at me," said DiPina, who had been re-baptized in the Baptist faith. She made her decision to go to seminary.

"I always tell Toni, she was put on that blanket for a reason," Mitchell said.

There was also one other affirmation from her past. On a visit to St. Louis eight years ago, foster brother Michael Booker took DiPina on an unexpected visit. They drove to a house in north St. Louis. On the front stoop, DiPina saw Nina Lewis.

"You don't know me, do you?" DiPina said shyly.

Lewis looked into a face she hadn't seen in 20 years and said: "Of course I know you, Antoinette."

DiPina had reconnected with the only woman in her childhood who had complete faith in her, despite her origins.

In the same way, DiPina has faith in St. Louis' recently abandoned newborn. Society should never write off the power and possibilities of this new baby, she said.

Last month the St. Louis City Juvenile Court granted the baby's caregivers the right to give him a name: Daniel.

"Oh," gasped DiPina when she learned the name. "Daniel from the lion's den. That's good."

CHILDREN OF GOD

The campus of Phillips Academy prep school in Andover, Mass., is one of the loveliest in New England, with lustrous greens, tidy stone walls and a light-filled, walnut-paneled chapel that has served some of the most privileged teenagers in this country's history.

"Rev. Toni" - as the kids call DiPina here - has been giving spiritual guidance and Bible study to many of these children for two years while she's been in seminary. It's a job she loves because she can open her students' eyes to injustice and inequity in the world.

"It's all about crossing boundaries," she said while arranging the stage for her Sunday service - one day after she marched in her graduation ceremony from seminary with Lewis in attendance.

Lewis sits quietly, almost invisibly, in one of the pews as the children of Phillips Academy wander into the airy chapel in flip-flops and jeans. It's exam time, and the teens have sullen faces.

DiPina planned a Christian rock service to lighten things up.

On the stage a full band begins to play, their beat thumping awkwardly through the rigid pews, out the doors and on to campus.

The teens aren't sure what to do. DiPina surveys her flock. She begins clapping and swaying with the beat in a pew and then dances into the aisle. She flashes her infectious smile.

Then a girl in a yellow shirt claps. Others slowly join in. Soon they are in the aisle with DiPina.

They follow her, laughing up the steps and onto the chapel's stage. The children born of privilege join a woman of the humblest of origins. Together, they dance.

Mark Learman and Matthew Fernandes of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch news research department contributed to this article.