Pietro Roma, maker of plaster figures, is struggling for existence in one room in a tenement with his blind wife and their granddaughter Marianna, who markets her grandfather's products in a pushcart.
Robert Brent and Dick Morgan, the former wealthy, the latter poor, are chums at one of the big colleges until they both fall in love with Viola Scott, a college girl.
Upon striking oil on his farm, Silas T. Pettingill (Charles Eldridge) moves to Park Avenue at the behest of his social-climbing wife Maria (Kate Blancke) and daughter Helen (Emmy Wehlen).
A young girl is reared on a desert island by natives and led to believe that she is a goddess. One day an outsider comes to the island, and persuades her to accompany him to preach about the kindness and love she has experienced.
Stella Le Vere, an ambitious but struggling actress, is abandoned by her husband and is forced to leave her baby girl, Grace, in the care of an orphan asylum.
Struggling artist Ned Templeton and his wife Joan are leading a poverty-stricken life in Paris. Threatened by starvation and eviction, Joan is forced to become a prostitute.
Tex Benton, riding across the country, sees a turtle, catches a jack rabbit and tests out the old fable of the tortoise and the hare; when the rabbit wins, Tex vows to model his behavior on that style.
Notorious pirate Joaquin Santos lives by the saying, "Dead Men Tell No Tales". He conspires with the prominent Squire Rattray to take over and plunder the Lady Jermyn, a ship carrying a considerable amount of gold, and then destroy the ship and kill its crew.
Becky Warder constantly indulges in the telling of little white lies. In an innocent effort to ease the troubled marriage of her quarreling friends Eve and Fred Lindon, Becky meets secretly with Fred, thereby constructing a web of deceit that leads Eve to suspect Becky of trifling with her husband's affections.
An Eastern boy is sent to the West to run the family's sheep ranch. The presence of sheep anger nearby cattlemen, who don't want to share their cattle's grazing lands with them, and their leader has no compunctions about resorting to drastic measures to protect his interests.