MISQUAH — Tim Brevik installed a new 200-gallon minnow tank at Tim’s Bait & Liquor on Thursday, retiring a unit that had been in continuous service since 1979 and that, in its owner’s words, “developed a personality toward the end, and not an easy one.”

A crowd of perhaps a dozen gathered at the Highway 9 store to watch the first minnows transferred into the new tank, a stainless-and-glass model Brevik ordered from a supplier in Bemidji and waited three weeks to receive. The changeover took most of the morning and was conducted with the unhurried ceremony the occasion seemed, to those present, to call for. “You don’t replace a tank you’ve had since Carter every day,” one onlooker observed. “You show up for that.”

“It holds temperature a lot better,” Brevik said, leaning on the counter and watching the fatheads explore their new accommodations. “The old one, you’d lose half a scoop of minnows on a hot July day if you weren’t standing right there babysitting it. And it made a noise — a hum, then a knock, then the hum again, all day and all night. I’d gotten used to it. Truth be told the place feels a little quiet now without it, like the store’s holding its breath.”

Reaction among those present was favorable and, in a few cases, moved. “It’s a nice tank,” said Harold Aas, the retired postmaster, who stayed roughly forty minutes and inspected it from several angles. “You can see clear to the back of it. You couldn’t before — the old glass had gone cloudy as a March sky.” Brevik said the store will continue to carry fatheads, shiners, suckers, and leeches, and that the old tank is free to anyone with a truck “and pretty low standards,” adding that as of Thursday afternoon no one had claimed it, though three people had stopped to look it over and one had “gotten a sentimental look and walked off without saying why.” The store, established in 1971, opens daily at 5:30 a.m.