MISQUAH — The population sign at the south edge of town reads 3,916 as of Tuesday, up two, after a week that gave Misquah two babies and — for the first time in recent memory — took no one (see Obituaries).

The newcomers arrived two days apart at the county hospital, forty minutes south, which is where Misquah’s babies have arrived since the local clinic stopped delivering in the 1980s. A daughter, eight pounds one ounce, was born June 24 to Eric and Kayla Sorensen; a son, seven pounds even, June 26 to Adam and Jen Ouellette. Both are reported healthy. Both are reported, by tired and cheerful parents, to be loud.

“We passed the Ouellettes in the hallway on the way out,” Kayla Sorensen said. “Them coming in, us going home. We’ve known each other since high school. Now our kids have the same birthday week. That’s a small town for you — you can’t even have a baby without running into somebody you went to school with.”

The sign itself is kept, as it has been for years, by the pressman everyone knows simply as Earl, who repaints the final digit by hand whenever the count moves, mixing the green himself to a shade the hardware store no longer stocks. Over the years he has had more occasion to paint the number down than up, and he does not pretend the two feel the same. “This one I did with a clear conscience and a steady hand,” he said. “You get the sad ones right out of respect. You get the happy ones right out of joy. I allow myself a little more care on the happy ones, and this was two of them at once, so I took my time.”

It is small arithmetic — two up, none down — but in a town that reads its own population sign the way other places read a stock ticker, it is the kind of week you write down, and then read twice to be sure of, and then mention to a neighbor at the Co-op just to say it out loud. The number will move again, in time, in the other direction; it always does. For this week, it went up, and Earl got out the good brush.