Stroke & Rain

Ceylon sunbeams beat wickedly last week on the high silk topper of Australia's arch-protectionist Prime Minister, James Henry Scullin, the Laborite who has ringed his Dominion with both a tariff wall and a barbed wire circle of embargoes (TIME, July 21).

Mr. Scullin was in Ceylon en route to the Imperial Conference at London. While his ship coaled in teeming Colombo he decided to brave the sunbeams, see the town. Cheerfully he advanced down the quay escorted by punctilious officials (Ceylon is British) then suddenly turned ashen pale, tottered, collapsed in a sprawling faint.

Rushed back aboard his ship, Australia's Prime Minister was said by his physician to have suffered "merely a slight touch of the sun aggravated by his pleurisy . . . nothing serious . . . will continue on to London."

In Adelaide, Australia, there was even bigger news than Mr. Scullin's sunstroke. The three-year rain scarcity which has cursed South Australia with meagre grain crops suddenly gave way to what joyous editors headlined as "Splendid Rains!"

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