On a whim, a greedy tycoon decides to corner the world market in wheat. This doubles the price of bread, forcing grain producers into charity lines and others further into poverty. The film contrasts the differences between the lives of those who work to grow the wheat and the life of the man who dabbles in its sale for profit.
A gang of thieves lure a man out of his home so that they can rob it and threaten his wife and children. The family barricade themselves in an interior room, but the criminals are well-equipped for breaking in. When the father finds out what is happening, he must race against time to get back home.
A pair of young ladies cause trouble at the cinema with their lavish hats.
The Count sets out to make a private room for him and his Countess, built in such a way no one can see, hear, and most importantly, disturb them. But unbeknownst to the Count, his wife has set her eyes on the court minstrel. Based on Edgar Allan Poe's “The Cask of Amontillado” and Honoré de Balzac's “La Grande Breteche”.
A man rents an apartment and furnishes it in remarkable fashion.
While caring for his sick daughter, a doctor is called away to the sickbed of a neighbor. He finds the neighbor gravely ill, and ignores his wife's pleas to come home and care for his own daughter, who has taken a turn for the worse.
A Nick Carter serial
A Nick Carter serial
Mary Rollins is torn between selfish depravity and righteous living. After she's coerced into helping with the burglary of her minister's apartment, she comes face to face with her misdeeds.
A boy helps a convict to escape after meeting him at his mother's graveyard. The convict gets rich in Australia and when he returns is arrested again but released in the last moment after a dying convict confesses.
Surviving fragment of a longer film. A magician makes a butterfly woman appear, and a woman in a star. Exhausted, the magician falls asleep and the star woman turns into a spider, dragging the butterfly into her web.
Nellie is a struggling artist whose paintings lie unsold. Billy, a successful painter, loves her, but she tells him that she cannot marry until she sells her paintings. Billy recruits his friends to buy her paintings. At first she is excited by the sudden success, but when she learns the truth, Nellie leaves her sweetheart to accept the proposal of a rival painter.
A son leaves to seek his fortune in the city. Many years later he returns and checks into his parents' inn. They don't recognize him, but noticing his fat wallet, plan to rob him.
After three years at sea, Edward returns home to find his sweetheart forced into an engagement with a much older man.
Directed by Albert Capellani.
Mrs. Kendrick borrows a jeweled necklace from a friend for an important social event. The necklace is stolen, and Mr. Kendrick goes into debt to replace it. The thief discovers it's costume jewelry, but the Kendricks never learns the truth; Husband and wife struggle for years to pay off the huge debt.
During the reign of Oliver Cromwell, Catholic worship is forbidden on pain of death. Three soldiers are arrested as Catholics and condemned to die. Cromwell decides to spare two of them and to determine which should die by chance. The guards bring the first child they meet. Whichever soldier she gives the 'death disc' to shall die. Cromwell is charmed by the girl and gives her his signet ring. By chance the child is the daughter of one of the soldiers and gives the death disc to her father, because she thinks it's pretty. The child is returned home to her mother, who learns of her husband's pending execution and of the power of the ring. She rushes to the place of execution and saves her husband by producing the ring.
Two boys, twins, leave the old homestead to seek their fortune in the world. They go divergent roads, and are soon widely separated one from the other, but they grow lonesome and try to find each other's whereabouts, without success. We lose sight of Bill and Dick is seen up against it good and hard. For him the future looks like a chalk ring on a blackboard, until he happens to saunter along the Bowery, where the manager of a dime museum offers him a job to play the gorilla. It looks good so he accepts. It is pretty sort until the astute impresario decides to pull off an innovation: that is, a gorilla and lion in the same cage. Of course Dick objects most strenuously to this arrangement, but his objections are quailed with a treacherous looking run, so he is forced to share the same menagerie hallroom with the lion.
During the French Revolution, a wealthy couple lives safely by professing republican beliefs. When a mob attacks a nearby chateau an aristocrat bursts into the couple's home. They save his life by disguising him as a servant, but he soon forces his attentions on the wife. Hearing their struggle, the husband intervenes and, stripping the aristocrat of his disguise, thrusts him outdoors to be killed by the mob.
An anonymous donor drops a gold coin in the shoe of a homeless girl as she sleeps. A gambler with a 'sure thing' borrows the coin and wins a fortune, but he can't find her again to repay her.
