“Is it me or are you glowing like a diamond-studded reliquary?” inquired smugly a firefly to his perhaps expectant wife as they buzzed around their usual cote, but she responded “nary a reason to get excited, dude, it's just the luciferin, remember, we are fireflies”.

Release the doves from their cote and bring forth the bells and gongs from the reliquary where they languish unplayed, to begin the day’s celebration, and, at eventide, attract the flying creatures which glow with luciferin to fill the night skies with their fairy light, and nary a mouth shall be dry, and no stomach go hungry for want of sweet drink nor sumptuous cakes, as we toast our saint’s natal day!

Matthew loved to visit the natural history museum with its reliquary of Egyptian artifacts -- various animal-headed gods inside and hieroglyphics outside, and the displays of stuffed (taxidermy) animals of the woods and plains, but, even better, the cotes of live animals he could see and touch – the huge Madagascar hissing cockroaches and the hairy tarantulas, plus the “Lights Off!!” exhibit in a darkened room with its luminescent creatures who could create light with luciferin – the fireflies flickering in their giant jar and glowing ocean creatures in their tiny tank, with nary a sound from the awestruck crowd gazing in wonder at the spectacle.

"There ain't nary a luciferin in this cote--and I'll be bound there ain't none in that reliquary there neither," said Gunther of the Lowlands, drawing a chorus of groans from the assembled masses (they had been told he was going to weave a grandiose one-sentence tale containing four challenging words, and that this so-called "quadrivial quandary" was going to change their lives forever; some of them had come from villages as far off as Wommlet and Fartlesburg, Poached Egg and Hornquist, from the Grody Hills in the North to Greater Surmbury ("land of the pod people") in the South, and from all around the Saint Gladys Basin and outlying regions, even as far as fabled Moosesack, which no living man had seen; and they had walked for many days to get here, braving disgruntled sows and other menaces along the way; and others had camped out o'ernight, playing kazoos and suckin' down S'mores around faltering campfires where tales of ghostly dwarves were woven by the frigid, gibbering lips of unwilling third-graders--and all of this, I say, they endured, only to receive for their trouble this anticlimactic denouement: it was an outrage, not to be borne, and surging forward as one they seized Gunther of the Lowlands, and hoisted the startled rocket scientist above their heads, and rushed bellowing to Brimley's Gorge, where they hurled Gunther shrieking into the abyss, there to be be devoured by the tapirs and platypi which many believed lurked at the bottom).