When retired New England skipper Captain Purcell finds Kit as a baby in a storm, he adopts the child, who grows up to be an adventurous youngster of the docks.

Will the orphan girl win her hero in spite of scheming relatives who seek to keep her in the background?

Gretchen Ann runs away from her foster parents but is sheltered first by Bill Kelley, a train brakeman, then by elderly oilman Pete Sebastian. After Gretchen keeps Sebastian from being duped by a medium, he sends her to a fashionable school, asking that she agree to marry him when she returns.

Jerry O'Donnell arrives from Ireland to be with her father in America. However, she soon finds living with her stepmother unpleasant, Jerry leaves home and encounters John Garland, a millionaire, now a widower, whom she knew in Ireland.

Poor abused Nora runs into privileged bored Beatrice while wandering onto the rich girl's family estate. Both girls notice the uncanny resemblance between each other, so they decide to switch places. However, trouble soon arises for both girls in their new roles.

When a circus troupe comes to a small, extremely conservative New England town, the residents go to their minister to have him protest the scandalous fact that the female tightrope walker wears a pair of pink tights. When she has an accident and is forced to recuperate at the minister's house, he has to hide her in order to avoid even more of a scandal. Mazie Darton, a high-wire performer with a traveling circus, longs for a peaceful country life. Forced to stay in a small town while laid up with an injury, Darton is spurned by the conservative townspeople. Rev. Jonathon Meek, the local parson, befriends the circus troupe, especially Darton. But he, too, opens himself to criticism from his flock, who protest his closeness with the show people. Eventually, Darton's boyfriend arrives and the pair become closer. The parson fades from the scene as a possible mate for Darton, who ends up winning the hearts of the townspeople.

Small-town girl Mary Barry wins a beauty contest and goes to New York to meet D. V. Cortelyou, the magazine's publisher. Greatly taken by young girl, Cortelyou arranges for her to live with Dolly Griffith, a woman of questionable reputation who often aids him in his wicked schemes of blackmail and seduction. During a party seemingly in Mary's honor, Cortelyou obtains some apparently compromising evidence with which to blackmail Mrs. Young, the wife of a wealthy broker; Cortelyou then makes rough advances toward Mary, and one of his assistants, Jack McGuire, gives him a good beating.

The department store clerk Mary prevents a robbery at the store where she works, involving a necklace belonging to a rich unmarried woman named Eva Bandy. Later, she manages via a misunderstanding to prevent a million-dollar robbery of the same woman. With the man of her dreams, who helped her foil the robberies, she is "adopted" by Eva.

A supposedly tame ape suddenly goes on a rampage in a small town. Based on a true story.

M'liss, raised in the mountains as an unruly tomboy, is orphaned and is offered "protection" by Calaveras John and Johnny Cake, friends of her father's murderer. She shows no interest in anything until the new schoolmaster persuades her to tidy herself and get some education. Believing the schoolmaster to be in love with some other girl, M'liss decides to run off with another man.