This intriguing snapshot was taken exactly one hundred tears ago today in the Big Hangar At Pointy Town, a big hangar in Pointy Town. We can see a number of people, now all dead, standing or milling about, and, with a single exception, not one of them is paying attention to the large and mysterious crate. The group slap bang next to the crate is peering past it, at something else, we know not what. Others are seen walking past, as if oblivious. In the foreground, however, we see a diminutive figure, possibly a curious infant, who seems to want to move towards the crate but is being bustled away by its guardian or governess, dressed in hood and cape.

Can it be that the tiny one, alone of those in the hangar, knew what the crate contained, was attracted to it by invisible forces the nature of which must remain to us as mysterious as the crate itself? Some say this snap is the sole evidence of the arrival in Pointy Town of the Grunty Man. For it is thought that, with uncharacteristic cunning, he had himself concealed in the crate and shipped across the mighty oceans, from the pestilential land that spawned him to the fair shores of our own continent!

If this is so, we are compelled to ask – who was that infant? And what became of them? Answers on a postcard, please.

(Snap spotted at Ptak Science Books)