This pastoral romance is the last film in which Griffith draws directly upon his warmest memories of a bucolic childhood, as well as his final reflection on a quickly vanishing America. Without the intervention of subplots, chases, sexually imperiled heroines, and the rest of his beloved melodramatic preoccupations, Griffith employs an urban/country dialectic—a typical strategy of the time—to valorize the virtues of a country girl (Gish) who patiently waits for her man to return to his senses after being “corrupted” by a city woman.