MISQUAH — The concert ran fifty-two minutes. Director Hannah Moe, who promised short and delivered shorter, opened with the youngest campers — six weeks of instruction, one song, universally survived — and closed with the full camp band, which by this point in August has stopped sounding like a group of children who happen to be in the same room and started sounding like a band.

One hundred eighty-seven chairs were counted on the lawn against a target of two hundred, which the school is calling a success and which the town is calling “we brought them, didn’t we.” Nearly all were marked underneath. Four were not, and are at the school, where they will remain until claimed or until the fair needs them, whichever comes first.

The eleventh number was conducted by Phil Brekke, thirty-one years the band director here and eleven years retired, borrowed back for the second time this summer under terms negotiated between the two directors and honored to the letter: one march, one bow, and thanks lasting under fifteen seconds. Moe timed it. It ran eleven. Brekke returned to his chair in the third row and, per multiple accounts, did not look up for a minute and a half.

Then came the part nobody put on the program. The Perseids had peaked overnight Wednesday under a new moon, and Thursday night was forecast nearly as good, and somewhere in the last ten minutes of the concert the word had gone around the lawn that people were going to the landing after. They went — about ninety of them, carrying the same marked chairs they had carried up the hill four hours earlier — and set up along the shore and on the dock and waited the twenty minutes Sigrid Pelto has been telling this town to wait since June.

It was, by every account received at this office, the best meteor night in years: better than a dozen an hour after eleven, several bright enough to draw the involuntary noise, one long one just before midnight that crossed most of the sky and drew, from ninety people who had already applauded a sunset once this month, nothing at all. Nobody clapped. “You don’t clap for that one,” one attendee explained. The last chairs came off the landing sometime after one.