Fisherman’s drama about a woman who thinks her husband has drowned while fishing, and then marries one of his colleagues after a while. Then her husband suddenly pops up again; it turns out that his colleague appears to have lied about his death.

John Howard Payne leaves home and begins a career in the theater. Despite encouragement from his mother and his sweetheart, Payne begins to lead a life of dissolute habits, and this soon leads to ruin and misery. In deep despair, he thinks of better days, and writes a song that later provides inspiration to several others in their own times of need.

Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.

Seamen Enoch Arden returns home after a long absence marooned on a desert island. At home he finds his wife married to another, and though he loves her, he cannot bear to disrupt her current happiness.

On a family outing to the golf course rich boy Georgie’s mother invites their poor caddy “Rags” to Georgie’s birthday party which pleases Georgie’s sweetie Carmen, but not the jealous lad. “Rags” feeling self-conscious about his clothes snags rich boy Willie’s togs and locks him in the coal cellar. After many comical mishaps all is straightened out!

The famous child detective Dick, with the collaboration of his stenographer, succeeds in uncovering a desperate character. But the little stenographer falls victim to the wiles of the villain's evil accomplices, and is locked by them under vile duress in a barrel of ashes, where she falls asleep.