An exceptionally capable girl, Trixie Joyce, proves a great help, to her mother, a widow with a large family of girls. They receive a proposition from Henrietta Joyce, Mrs. Joyce's wealthy sister-in-law, to take Trixie as a companion, feed and clothe her and in place of wages, send her mother an allowance sufficient to support the rest of the family. Both realize it is the solution of a hard problem, and Trixie accepts the offer. Henrietta is close-fisted and selfish in money matters, but she also has a strain of morbidly-romantic sentiment in her nature, so the largest part of Trixie's work is reading aloud to her mistress quantities of swashbuckling, mid-Victorian novels.

Jovial and big-hearted, Jim Brice, of the Howard Detective Agency, is sent to trap bribetakers in a nearby city.

Young Virgie's father, Captain Herbert Cary, is a Confederate soldier. During the Civil War, Virgie, along with her slave Uncle Billy and her mother, are caught between the lines. While Virgie's father is fighting, her family is visited by Union soldiers, including Colonel Morrison, who is assigned to capture her father. Virgie inadvertently helps Morrison, by singing "Dixie" to him and then hiding her father. In the end, Virgie and her father are able to escape, and Virgie even sings "Polly Wolly Doodle" with the Union soldiers and hugs her father, now a Union officer,

Returning home from a matinee, Ralph Brent, a poor actor, finds his step-child dead. The child's mother returns intoxicated, having purchased drink instead of medicine for the child, with the money he had given her. He accuses her of causing the little one's death, and snatching the bottle of liquor from which she is about to drink, throws it away. Infuriated, she springs at her husband with a bread knife, stumbles and accidentally kills herself. Fearing that he will be suspected of murder. Brent hastily makes up in the disguise of an old man and leaves the house.