John Howard Payne at his most miserable point in life, writes a song which becomes popular and inspires other people at some point in their lives.

Over the protests of his mother and sweetheart, writer John Howard Payne leaves home seeking adventure. In England, he becomes involved with The Worldly Woman who rebukes him after he returns penniless from debtors' prison. He travels to France and then Tunis, where he dies, leaving only the song "Home, Sweet Home" as his legacy. In another story, Apple Pie Mary, a cook in a mining camp, loves a young man who goes East to marry a wealthy woman. He hears the song, however, and returns to Mary. The next story concerns a widow with three sons. When one son kills another over money, the grief-stricken widow wants to commit suicide, but she hears the song and decides to live for the sake of her third son. The final story involves a young wife who plans to leave her older husband for a younger man. As she hears the melody played by a violinist in another apartment, she decides to stay with her husband and the two raise a family. Finally, Payne is seen in a pit, imprisoned by Lust and Greed. His sweetheart appears as an angel in the sky and Payne is finally free to join her because of the good that has resulted from "Home, Sweet Home."—Pamela Short

The photoplay shows John Howard Payne, the author of the famous song, "Home Sweet Home," as he left his home at Easthampton, Long Island, to go upon the stage, his success there and final failure and imprisonment for debt. We then see him go abroad to England, where he writes plays, and finally is forced to sell them all in a bundle to a producing manager for a few hundred dollars. He is shown at the height of his success, at his love affair with the widow of the poet Shelley and his subsequent flouting by that lady for his more successful countryman and rival in love as well as in letters, Washington Irving. His flight to France, his writing of "Home Sweet Home," that deathless lyric, his return to the land of his birth, and at the last, his death while American consul at Tunis, alone, unhonored and unsung, and then his mother's death, disappointed and grieved that her beloved son had done so little for the world. Then, in a series of little slices out of life, are shown the mistake his mother had made in believing her son died, leaving nothing. The strains of Payne's immortal song have echoed and reechoed 'round the world and all classes and races of man and womankind have attuned their ears unto its message. First we see a little western frontier town with its one little lunch counter run by a young girl, "Apple Pie Mary." To the rough townsmen and the miners she is cold and harks not to their words of love, but instead, opens the floodgates of her heart to an eastern boy, on prospecting bent for gold. Her heart won, she would forsake this flower of the western highways for a stately beauty of the hothouses of eastern society, but the gentle strains of "Home Sweet Home," played by the halting and stumbling fingers of a peripatetic miner minstrel, guide his wandering footsteps back into the paths of duty and real love, and he finds his "Home Sweet Home" in the calico covered arms of "Apple Pie Mary." A swift transition to another class of life, and there is seen where the walls of an apartment house are ruthlessly torn away and we see revealed a husband, elderly and past his prime, and his partner of life. The husband, immersed in the cares of business and no longer young, lavishes jewels and clothes and pleasures on his beautiful young wife, but she grows tired of them and fails to recognize the sterling worth of her husband and allows a younger and handsomer man to talk love lyrics into her ear while he urges her to leave her good but uninteresting and unromantic partner and fly with the younger Romeo, and seek unlawful happiness with each other. Torn by the struggles between her imaginary love of this youthful lover and her duty and respect for her husband, the young wife is about to leave her home when through the open window comes the haunting air of a violin. The air is "Home Sweet Home," played by the master hand of a famous violinist to a chambermaid on the floor below. Its message is clear to the young wife, and she dismisses her cavalier and remains true to the man she had wed. A third shift on the great stage of life and is seen a poor old mother and her two sons, whom she loves and cherishes, but who are both very bad boys. One of them is fortunate enough to acquire some money, and the other covets it and attacks his brother. Both are carrying deadly hate in their hearts for each other, and in a fight to the death both are killed. The old mother is rendered insane with the shock and sits dry-eyed, shrieking aloud in her agony of heart, her very soul bared by the terrible tragedy that has come upon her, when the mellow tinkling of a guitar in the hands of a neighbor restores her to a reasonable being, and she finds peace and consolation in her faith in God. Needless to say, the mellifluous melody was "Home Sweet Home." Thus, in a series of life's dramas of smiles and tears, is shown the influence of the most beautiful and far-reaching of songs, and it is suggested in the play that Payne's mother at last realized that her son had made one great success of his life, though it was but to be the ever-living and deathless lines of "There's no place like home."—Moving Picture World synopsis

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.—Snow Leopard