Biograph Company

The children of a household attempt to capture Santa, but they catch something else entirely.

Ramona, residing on her wealthy Spanish adoptive mother's rancho in California, falls in love with the Indian Alessandro. When Ramona is denied permission to marry Alessandro, the lovers elope, only to find a life of great hardship and unhappiness amidst the greed and injustice of the white landowners.

A wagon train heading west across the great desert runs out of water, and is attacked by Indians. One man -- their last hope -- is sent out to find water.

From the dungeon where the lean beasts prowled, Hassan Bey summoned from her young lover's arms the old rug maker's daughter. Still she was obdurate. In his madness, he had poisoned his other love with the deadly sting of a serpent. His fury spent, he fell from bey to man, and sought to atone according to his light.

An old colonel is proud as a peacock: his son leads a group of volunteers in the American Civil War. Untill one day his son returns home as a deserter.

Happy in her devotion to her unfortunate sister and the promise of honest love that had come into her life, the girl was perhaps blind to true values. She became indifferent to her life and its surroundings. Accordingly she accepted the stranger and his doubtful promises. Honest love and duty were forgotten, until, caught near life's uncertain edge, she was called back by her blind sister's peril. Thus was true love separated from blind infatuation and life's lesson learned.

A man leaves his wife and two daughters for work in a carpentry shop. At work, he initially refuses a beer with lunch, then gives in. After work, two friends take a little while to convince him to go for a refreshing malt beverage, then to have another and another....

Knocked down by an automobile, the intoxicated tramp is taken to the doctor's house, received and treated to a square meal. The husband of a patient has just died, calls on the doctor, intending to kill him. The grief-crazed man is foiled several times by the return of the tramp, whom the maid at last pushes out of the house. She hears the doctor struggling with his assailant and faints. The tramp hears the doctor's cry for help and enters by a rear window, despite the objections of a policeman, in time to save his benefactor.

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.

Everything he did seemed to be misconstrued, except by the little lady he loved. The town roisters made fun of her and his love. That made trouble and the chief vigilante believed him the cause of it all. So he was "in wrong" all around. The girl's father also sided with the opinion of the world, and sent both the boy and girl away. Mother was on a visit at the time, and therein the need of such a one at home was proved, for once back she sent the father out to bring them home again. The boy in the gold hills had been misunderstood again. Marauding merchants had left their victim on the mountain pass and the boy, coming on the scene, was again accused, but the lie in the end destroyed itself.

Hard as nails and as strong winded as a gale in March, Red Hicks may have been a bit "chesty," but he was in perfect trim. The town depended on the champion, O'Shea, the fighting Irishman, to make soft putty of the world famous pugilist, but on the day of the fight there was no O'Shea. The supposition was he did not have the price: and other domestic difficulties interfered. O'Shea's trainer, however, solved the problem and Bed Hicks found his Waterloo.

In this film one is shown the contrast of two fathers. One father refuses to believe his son guiltless, while the other, fully realizing the weakness of his son, struggles to save him from further disgrace. In this attempt he exonerates the innocent youth, but at the same time exposes the guilt of his own son.

"He was a regular boy and his father a switchman. The boy determined to be like his dad and spent his play hours around the switch-tower. Thus at the crucial moment he was able to save his father's honor as a switchman, when the struggle between love and duty came and later to come to the aid of his parents in the hands of the desperate counterfeiters, eventually causing their capture." —Moving Picture World synopsis.

After the death of his wife the baby was all the sheriff had left, the promise of hope in the future, and the reflection of all that was dear in the past. But a sheriff has no time to tread a cradle rocker, so the baby started off on the long journey to relatives across the desert. Then the sheriff was called away to hunt the "bad men" of the desert, and found there a deserted prairie schooner, the occupants dead and his baby gone.

His mind perverted by the many lies forced upon him, Lang becomes an outcast from the Labor Union. In order to reinstate himself he conceives a plot to do away with the owner of the iron works, an infernal machine stuffed in a turkey's breast. The story tells how the turkey found its way to a table where there was more love than plenty.

A widower and his two daughters live in the wilds of the north woods. They form the acquaintance of two trappers, Bob Cole and Jim Watson, who hunt in the neighborhood. As fate will have it, both trappers love the same girl, the elder sister, but she loves Bob, while the younger girl is attracted by Jim. The elder girl, however, through a woman's whim, pays marked attention to Jim simply to arouse jealousy in Bob. He, in temper, cannot reason her motive and leaves, so through pique she accepts and marries Jim. Later Bob revisits the place, feeling that the girl loves him best, and tries to induce her to go away with him. He finally succeeds and, as you may imagine, fate brings about justice.

A potentially violent patient in an insane asylum is calmed when he hears a nurse playing the piano. But shortly afterwards he breaks free, eludes his pursuers, and acquires a gun. He soon comes to a house where a young wife is home alone, and there is a tense confrontation.

Stern parents have ever been relentless obstacles in love's young dream, but it is perhaps quite doubtful if ever love could equal the accentuated bliss and anguish of these two. She refused to eat for her hero and for her he bore the marks of battle, an eye made black by a cruel parent's fist. Tired of such an unsympathetic world, they sought the wilderness, where, had it not been for Indian Charlie, these two "babes in the wood" would have ended their dream in a manner quite too disagreeable to think of.

In the apartment hotel lived the aspiring maid, whose solicitude maintained order in the bachelor's apartment. He was her ideal, and the all-adoring bell-boy was firmly but gently given to understand that maids who read "Heliotrope Glendening's Advice to Young Ladies" look higher than ice-water toters. A compromising complication, however, with an unexpected visit from a beautiful lady, quite convinces the aspiring one that wealthy young bachelors may be the grandest men ever, but their aspirations, when it comes to the crucial test, are not for chambermaids. Science influences his actions so much that he gets into trouble with the police.

D.W. Griffith short intercuts two different stories before mixing them together at the end. The film focuses on a telephone girl who leaves work for her lunch break at the same time as "The Lady" goes to a jewelry store to pick up some priceless jewels. When the telephone girl returns to work she gets a phone call from the house of "The Lady" as a robber has broken in and is trying to steal the jewels.