Charlie is amidst a number of loving couples in the park. He parodies one couple by embracing a tree. A girl asks her beau for a love token. The beau steals a pocket watch from a sleeping man, Charlie gets it away from him and gives it to the girl. He later gets it back and tries to sell it to his original owner who calls a policeman. Many park visitors wind up getting tossed into the lake.

The plot is a satire derived from Hugh Antoine D'Arcy's poem of the same title. The painter courts Madeleine but loses to the wealthy client who sits for his portrait. The despairing artist draws the girl's portrait on the barroom floor and gets tossed out. Years later he sees her, her husband and their horde of children. Unrecognized by her, Charlie shakes off his troubles and walks off into the future.

Charlie has trouble with actors' luggage and conflicts over who gets the star's dressing room. There are further difficulties with frequent scene changes, wrong entries and a fireman's hose. At one point he juggles an athlete's supposed weights. The humor is still rough: he kicks an older assistant in the face and allows him to be run over by a truck.

Charlie gets into a fight at his regular bar and finally crawls out under the door. He then boards a streetcar and follows a beautiful lady in a taxi. He breaks into her home. Her husband comes finds him trying to seduce his wife.

Charlie meets a couple and agrees to care for the man's crippled uncle. After the couple breaks up the man's new girl drops some eggs which Charlie slips on while trying to control the wheelchair. Charlie sets up the uncle near another wheelchair on a jetty, from which he lifts a beggar's cup and "invalid" sign. These he places with the uncle, and money begins to roll in. Charlie takes the money and buys himself a drink. Returning, he gets to know the abandoned young woman. After pushing the uncle and his chair into the drink and battling the beggar and two policemen (one of whom arrests the uncle), Charlie beats up his rival and gets the girl.

Charlie dreams he is in the stone age. There King Low-Brow rules a harem of wives. Charlie, in skins and a bowler, falls in love with the king's favorite wife, Sum-Babee. During a hunting trip the king is pushed over a cliff. Charlie proclaims himself king, but Ku-Ku discovers the real king alive. They return to find Charlie and Sum- Babee together.

An out-of-work swindler takes a job as a reporter. After witnessing a car go over cliff, he grabs a rival reporter's camera and races to the newspaper office to enter the photo as his own. His rival is delayed when he gets caught in a woman's bedroom by her jealous husband. The swindler follows the distribution of the paper containing his 'scoop' around town where he is once again chased by the rival reporter. Both end up on the cow-catcher of a streetcar.

An American boy turns out to be the long-lost heir of a British fortune. He is sent to live with the cold and unsentimental lord who oversees the trust.

John Howard Payne leaves home and begins a career in the theater. Despite encouragement from his mother and his sweetheart, Payne begins to lead a life of dissolute habits, and this soon leads to ruin and misery. In deep despair, he thinks of better days, and writes a song that later provides inspiration to several others in their own times of need.