ANY DAY.

By Henry Mitchell. Indiana Univ. Press. 272 pp. $24.95

Newspaper columns tend to take on a musty air soon after reaching hardcover. The Washington Post columns of the late Henry Mitchell are a rare exception. Mitchell’s gardening pieces have already appeared in book form—The Essential Earthman (1981) and One Man’s Garden (1992)—and now, five years after his death, comes a collection of musings from his weekly column, "Any Day."

The author emerges as a reflective and altogether decent man, clear eyed but uncynical, drawn over and over to such seemingly archaic topics as honor, virtue, and integrity. "Nothing infuriates some people more than the concept that one is too good to cheat," he observes. "They think everybody is born a bastard and that nobody should give himself airs about being better than the average run of folk." Elsewhere he muses on our innate tendency toward selfdeception in matters of righteousness: "We’ll all go to our graves as irrational as the day we were born, and the best we can do is watch out whenever our personal interest seems to coincide with celestial virtue." Of the essayist E. B. White, Mitchell reflects, "His work was civil and polite; he either had no gift of vitriol or else never felt any." The same could be said of Mitchell, a graceful and gracious observer of the human condition.