A painter turned tramp (Chaplin), devastated by losing the woman he was courting as a wealthy man, finds himself drunk and getting drunker by the minute with some sailors at a bar until he's literally falling down. He keeps futilely trying to draw the woman's picture on the floor with a piece of chalk until he finally passes out cold (or perhaps dies, as in the poem) at the end of the film.
Charlie begins to woo a woman on a bench, only to have her seaman boyfriend object. After a brick fight between the two men that eventually involves two police officers, all five people end up in the local pond to cool off.
A swindler scams a newspaper reporter-photographer and then, not realizing where the man is employed, applies for a job at his newspaper.
A villain, competing with his rival's race car, kidnaps the rival before the race. Mabel decides to take the wheel in his place.