Blade o' Grass

Deserted by his wife, John Ward gives up his rich home in the city, and takes his baby daughter with him. Retreating into the woods of Maine, he builds a log cabin to house him and the child. Hunting in the forest by day, he spends his evenings teaching the child, and reading to her from books he has brought with him. The years roll on. Dorothy grows up, a child of nature, knowing all its secrets intimately. Emerson Winthrop, a wealthy New Yorker, comes to the Maine woods to camp. In a stream, he sees a vision glide by him in a canoe. Struck by the beauty of the girl, he seeks her acquaintance. She, unaccustomed to the sight of strangers, is frightened and coy, but he wins her confidence. Together they roam the woods, and slowly within her is awakened a strange indescribable feeling. Winthrop knows it also, but to him it is love. Ward, realizing that Dorothy is taken with Winthrop, compels him to return to the city. Ward is beginning to reflect. A letter from his sister rebukes him for his injustice to Dorothy. "Because you have chosen to shut yourself from the companionship of men, there is no reason why a sweet girl should be deprived of the fullness of life," so the letter reads. Ward agrees that his sister is right, and sends Dorothy to the city for the "polish" it gives. Dorothy's ways are not the ways of a great city. Accustomed to the freedom of the woods, she cannot live, confronted by the rules and stinted bounds of a great metropolis. She returns home to live once more the free life of the forest. Winthrop, whom she has met in the city and for whom her love has grown, follows her and takes up his camp in the woods again. Fate seems to demand that Winthrop shall follow her in spite of Ward's warning. After a fierce struggle, he saves her from the fiendish attack of a native woodsman, and so Ward is compelled to bow before the mandates of love.