At a political club, the members debate whose bust will replace that of Theodore Roosevelt. Unable to agree, each goes to a sculptor's studio and bribes him to sculpt a bust of the individual favorite. Instead, the sculptor spends their fees on a dinner with his model during which he becomes so inebriated that he is taken to jail. There he has a nightmare, wherein three busts are created and animated from clay (through stop-motion photography) in the likenesses of Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republicans Charles W. Fairbanks and William Howard Taft. Finally an animated bust of Roosevelt appears.
Mack Sennett appears as a policeman and waiter in this film produced by the Biograph Company.
A woman who is filled with romantic ideas is making no secret of her eagerness to find a husband. Her father decides to help her by pressuring and threatening an eligible bachelor, who reluctantly allows wedding plans to be made.
Had the poor melancholy Dane, Hamlet, lived in this, the twentieth century, he would never have given voice to the remark, "Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!" No indeed! He would have procured some of the mysterious fluid compounded by an erudite scientist by which things animate and inanimate were rendered non est, for ten minutes at least, by simply spraying them with it. In an atomizer, he sends a quantity, accompanied by a letter, to his brother. In the hope of his putting it on the market. The brother regards it as a joke, and, while toying with the atomizer, accidentally sprays himself. Presto! he is gone, to the amazement of the messenger boy who has carried the package thither. The boy reads the letter, and at once sees the amount of fun he can get out of it, so he nips it.
and David Gill (UNKNOWN CHAPLIN; BUSTER KEATON: A HARD ACT TO FOLLOW) tell the proud, sad story of D.W
At the Crossroads of Life is a typically Victorian-style melodrama in which a girl's wishes to be an actress are condemned by her stern father, a man of the cloth who has no time for those in the acting profession.
A haughty politician, on seeing a satirical cartoon in a newspaper, rushes to the paper's offices to shoot the cartoonist. On discovering the cartoonist is a pretty woman, he falls instantly in love and wastes no time in trying to woo her.
A wealthy old alchemist and inventor has just perfected a motion picture camera with which he hopes to revolutionize the art of animated photography, and our story opens with the old man in his library studying out the plans of his invention. A telegram calls him hurriedly away. He replaces the papers in his safe, but, in his haste, neglects to lock it, which oversight is pardonable, as his wife and daughter are in the room at the time. The daughter's hand is sought in marriage by a worthy young man, whose attentions are looked upon with favor by herself and her parents. But he has a rival in the person of a contemptible villain, whose motives are purely mercenary, reasoning that this new invention will greatly enhance the father's already ample wealth.
A woodcutter says good-bye to his wife and child, and then goes off to work. After he has left, the mother leaves the child outside their cabin to play. Suddenly, an eagle swoops down and carries off the child. When the mother realizes what has happened, she runs to tell her husband. He and the other lumberjacks immediately set out to find and rescue the child.