It was crammed to the walls with what the Captain called his "miscellaneous objects": rocking-horses and blow-pipes, frogs' legs and battering rams, blotting paper and tiger feathers and garishly coloured maps of countries called Epiglottis and Urethra, a seven-and-a-half-stringed guitar and a deflated cricket ball (Alice couldn't work out how you could possibly deflate a cricket ball!), a tear-stained mirror and a nosebrush and a stuffed Indian Lobster and a tumult of other things that Alice could make neither head nor tail of. (Especially the deflated cricket ball, because, of course, a deflated cricket ball has neither a head nor a tail.) And Captain Ramshackle was no tidier than his room was; in fact he was worse. The old Badgerman was dressed in a patchwork suit of many different cloths and his hair was night-black with a streak of silver riding down his brow.

"I see that you're admiring my suit, Alice," the Badger Captain said, moving over to a mound of earth that rested on a leather-topped desk. "It's quite splendidly chaotic isn't it? Of course, it cost me not a penny, because I made this suit myself out of a book of tailor's samples. One must make one's ends meet, when one is a Randomologist."

"And what is a Randomologist?" asked Alice.

"What else could it be but somebody who studies Randomology?" replied Captain Ramshackle.

"And what is Randomology?"

"What else could it be than what a Randomologist studies?"

Alice felt that she was getting nowhere at all with her questions so she decided to ask no more. Instead she walked over to the desk where Captain Ramshackle was fiddling about with the mound of earth. Alice could see numerously numerous termites running hither and thither over the soil. "What I want to know," Ramshackle asked, "is what in the earth were you, a young girl, doing in my computermite mound?"