The book is a short fiction story describes the less than a hundred miles from the city of Gotham across broad green fields dotted into squares and oblong valleys by full-leafed maple and elm and mulberry was the village of Brookfield. A hundred years of expansion in the surrounding land had acted inversely with the little hamlet and had pinched it into a hermitical isolation. It was the May meeting at Morris Park and Morris Park is the most beautiful race course in all America. A race course is like a household everything is known absolutely everything.