She loved to tell of his earlier exploits.

How often, when younger, he had collected money for charities (particularly for the Deaf and Dumb Cats' League, in which he took special interest), by painting halves of salmon and ships on fire on the cold grey pavement! Armed with an accordion, and masked to the eyes, he had appeared at Eastbourne, and also at the Henley Regatta, as a Mysterious Musician.

At the regatta he had been warned off the course, to his great pride and joy.

Mrs Mitchell assured Edith that his bath-chair race with a few choice spirits was still talked of at St Leonard's (bath-chairmen, of course, are put in the chairs, and you pull them along).

Mr Mitchell was beaten by a short head, but that, Mrs Mitchell declared, was really most unfair, because he was so handicapped--his man was much stouter than any of the others--and the race, by rights, should have been run again.
When he was at Oxford he had been well known for concealing under a slightly rowdy exterior the highest spirits of any of the undergraduates.