Thomas Mitchell\'s essays on how to live well were completed in 1913, and reflect a clear mind and a good education, but also confidence about the world and society that were about to be shattered. No doubt some thoughts he expressed would have been impossible to reaffirm five years later. As we commemorate the centenary of terrible and unprecedented conflict, his intelligent voice from the past gives us an insight into how people thought before it and what was lost. This does not mean that Mitchell\'s ideas are not also an individual\'s, but it is now the combination of freshness and distance in this previously unpublished prose that makes it so compelling. His style also says much about the education system in Scotland and rural Aberdeenshire in particular, and his background was very similar to that of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Though they undoubtedly had different politics, they would both have agreed on the importance of society.Thomas Mitchell, born in 1870, was a tenant farmer at Mill of Ardo, a small settlement in North-East Scotland, and his family had leased since 1791. He was clearly well-educated and his house was full of books. He went to school in Foveran and Cultercullen in Aberdeenshire until he was seventeen and he enrolled in further education courses well into his twenties. He took over the lease in 1890 when his uncle died. He lived with his mother and grandmother. He was a quiet man who went to the mart in Aberdeen on a Friday and church on a Sunday. He married Margaret Finnie late in life and only after the death of his mother in 1922, and had two children, William and Margaret. William too was in the mould of his father and combined a keen sense of history with service to the community and the church. Thomas Mitchell died in 1950.