e floor was
soft sand, and when they had come to the very end of the cave there was
a door, and on it was written: UNIVERSAL TAPROOM. PRIVATE. NO ONE
ALLOWED INSIDE.

So they opened the door at once just to peep in, and then they
remembered what St. George had said.

"We can't be worse off than we are," said Harry, "with a dragon waiting
for us outside. Let's go in."

They went boldly into the taproom, and shut the door behind them.

And now they were in a sort of room cut out of the solid rock, and all
along one side of the room were taps, and all the taps were labeled with
china labels like you see in baths. And as they could both read words of
two syllables or even three sometimes, they understood at once that they
had gotten to the place where the weather is turned on from. There were
six big taps labeled "Sunshine," "Wind," "Rain," "Snow," "Hail," "Ice,"
and a lot of little ones, labeled "Fair to moderate," "Showery," "South
breeze," "Nice growing weather for the crops," "Skating," "Good open
weather," "South wind," "East wind," and so on. And the big tap labeled
"Sunshine" was turned full on. They could not see any sunshine--the cave
was lighted by a skylight of blue glass--so they supposed the sunlight
was pouring out by some other way, as it does with the tap that washes
out the underneath parts of patent sinks in kitchens.

Then they saw that one side of the room was just a big looking glass,
and when you looked in it you could see everything that was going on in
the world--and all at once, too, which is not like most looking glasses.
They saw the carts delivering the dead dragons at the County Council
offices, and they saw St. George asleep under the dragonproof veil. And
they saw their mother at home crying because her children had gone out
in the dreadful, dangerous daylight, and she was afraid a dragon had
eaten them. And they saw the whole of England, like a great puzzle
map--green in the field parts and brown in the towns, and black in the
places where they make coal and crockery and cutlery and chemicals. All
over it, on the black parts, and on the brown, and on the green, there
was a network of green dragons. And they could see that it was still
broad daylight, and no dragons had gone to bed yet.

Effie said, "Dragons do not like cold." And she tried to turn off the
sunshine, but the tap was out of order, and that was why there had been
so much hot weather, and why the dragons had been able to be