Author Archive: Retro

A primitive tribe are attacked by apemen and menaced by various prehistoric monsters.

Billy witnesses two tramps accidentally kill someone during a robbery. The tramps lock him up and decide that he must be killed, too.

A poor girl is secretly in love with a wealthy young planter. During the Civil War she helps him escape capture by Union soldiers. After the war, with his fortune gone, she confesses that she loves him.

Alfred Lucas, an industrious wood carver, is a dutiful husband and loving father. The happy little family of father, mother and two girl children, one six and the other eight, are seen enjoying their morning meal prior to his departure for work. A fond adieu, and Lucas is on his way. Assiduously working at his bench he strongly contrasts the drones, whose faces are noticeably seared with the lines of dissipation. At noontime luncheon is served, and kettles of beer are brought in by some. Lucas becomes a butt of ridicule on account of his refusal to imbibe, and after a deal of persuasion is prevailed upon to take just one drink. This was his undoing, for he likes the taste, and when work is over it takes but mild encouraging to make him yield to the invitation to go to the saloon. Several drinks make him forgetful of the family, anxiously waiting for him [...]

Arthur Rogers had been in the worst of luck for some time. Honest and industrious by nature, he was in the depths of despair at the sight of the misery his little family of a wife and two small children were subjected to. They were, in fact, on the verge of starvation. With crushed spirit, he seeks solace in drink, and in a drunken condition feels his wife would be better off without him, so he leaves. Immediately after his departure a lawyer calls to apprise Mrs. Rogers that her aunt’s estate, long in litigation, has been settled, leaving her a moderate fortune. This indeed is pleasant news, but if it had only come before her husband’s rash act. However, they remove to new quarters, and the children, at least, are happy. It is the night before Christmas, and they are ready for bed. They want to wait for Santa Claus, but mamma tells them [...]

The story told is a simple one, and grips from the very start. John Wharton, the husband of a true and trusting wife and father of an eight-year-old girl, through the association of rakish companions becomes addicted to the drink habit, and while the demon rum has not fastened its tentacles firmly, yet there is no question that given free rein the inevitable would culminate in time. Arriving home one afternoon in a wine besotted condition, he is indeed a terrifying spectacle to his little family. Later, after he has slept off the effects to some extent, while at supper, the little girl shows him two tickets for the theater, begging him to take her. After some persuasion he consents to go. The play is a dramatization of Emile Zola’s “L’Assommoir,” which shows how short a journey it is from peace and happiness to woe and despair by the road of rum. Here the picture [...]

The little one is playing with her doll while her mother lies sick. The poor woman dies, and the child, thinking her asleep, goes downstairs in search of a playmate. First she visits an austere old maid, and by her artlessness soon melts her coldness. Nest she goes across the hallway to a crabbed old bachelor and affects him the same way. The old maid misses one of her hair puffs and goes after the child, thinking she took it. While she is in the bachelor’s room talking to the child, several tenement-house youngsters steal a “scarlet-fever” notice and stick it on the bachelor’s door. This quarantines the three until the health officer appears and releases them. They then take the child to find its mamma and are horrified at finding her dead. As each wants to take the child they end the argument most logically. A wedding results.

Mrs. Wharton, a dashing widow, gives a party at her beautiful villa in honor of the presentation to her of a handsome diamond necklace by her fiancé. During the evening bridge participated in by a number of the guests, among whom is Myrtle Vane. Miss Vane is playing in wretched luck, and is advised several times by Mrs. Wharton to desist, but she still plays on in the vain hopes of the tide of fortune turning, until at last, in the extreme of desperation, she stakes her all and loses. Shame and disgrace stare her in the face. What can she do to recoup her depleted fortune? As one of the guests there is Professor Francois Paracelsus, the eminent palmister, who of course, was called upon to read the palms of those present. Sheets of paper were prepared and each imprinted their hand on a sheet to be read by the erudite soothsayer at his [...]

Mike breaks into an apartment to steal an old man’s money, not realizing it’s his girlfriend’s father. When he discovers whose apartment it is, he begs her for forgiveness.