Limerick is also the center of a large butter trade and has the biggest
condensed milk factory in the kingdom, using the milk of ten thousand
cows daily, which is gathered morning and evening by enormous motors
that go thundering around the roads like Juggernauts. They look like
steam-rollers, and are built the same way with four wheels that have
tires more than a foot wide, and they serve a double purpose by rolling
the roads daily while they are hauling in the milk. Each of these
ponderous vehicles carries a large tank that will hold a hundred gallons
of milk and hauls a trailer that carries two tanks of similar size, thus
making about three hundred gallons to the load, but it makes noise
enough for ten thousand gallons. The big tanks are painted white and the
machines are polished like the knockers on the front doors of the
Limerick houses. There are three of these machines, which start out at
daylight in the morning, and each goes in a different direction, picking
up the milk that is left in cans by the farmers at convenient cross-road
stations. When the tanks are all filled the Juggernaut comes rumbling
into town, making more noise than the railroad train, discharges its
load at the condensed milk factory, and then starts out in another
direction.
Limerick has a population of about forty thousand, which has been
reduced from fifty thousand during the last ten or twelve years by
emigration to America; and, as we find it the case everywhere, all the
young men who can get money enough to pay their steamship fares are
emigrating. Many young women go also, and "the best blood of the country
is lost to us," one of the priests remarked. The city has not increased
in numbers for centuries. It has merely held its own, and some
historians contend that it had more population five hundred years ago
than it has now. It was founded before the beginning of history.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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