The Largest Circulation There died recently a gentleman named Nat Gould, twenty million copies of whose books had been sold. They were hardly ever reviewed in the literary papers; advertisements of them rarely appeared; no puffs nor photographs of the author were thrust upon one, Unostentatiously he wrote them--five in a year--and his million public was assured to him. It is perhaps too late now to begin to read them, but we cannot help wondering whence came his enormous popularity. Mr. Gould, as all the world knows, wrote racing novels. They were called, _Won by a Neck_, or _Lost by a Head_, or _Odds On_, or _The Stable-lad's Dilemma_. Every third man in the Army carried one about with him. I was unlucky in this matter, for all my men belonged to the other two-thirds; they read detective stories about a certain Sexton Blake, who kept bursting into rooms and finding finger-marks. In your innocence you may think that Sherlock Holmes is the supreme British detective, but he is a child to Blake. If I learnt nothing else in the Army, I learnt that. Possibly these detective stories were a side-line of Mr. Gould's, or possibly my regiment was the one anti-Gould regiment in the Army. At any rate, I was demobilized without any acquaintance with the _Won by a Neck_ stories. There must be something about the followers of racing which makes them different from the followers of any other sport. I suppose that I am at least as keen on the Lunch Scores as any other man can be on the Two-thirty Winner; yet I have no desire whatever to read a succession of stories entitled _How's That, Umpire?_ or _Run Out_, or _Lost by a Wicket_. I can waste my time and money with as much pleasure on the golf-course as Mr. Gould's readers can on the race-course, but those great works, _Stymied_ and _The Foozle on the Fifth Tee_, leave me cold. My lack of interest in racing explains my lack of interest in racing novels, but why is there no twenty million public for _Off-side_ and _Fouled on the Touchline_? It is a mystery.