At a metropolitan theater there is billed, as the opening attraction, a new play entitled "The Ebb Tide." The young actress, who is engaged for the leading role, goes to the seashore to live in a little fishing village in order that she may absorb the "local color." She dwells among the fisher folk and dresses like them, so as to "live the part." To the same section, in search of atmosphere and recreation, comes the author of the play; and when one day he rescues a pretty but plainly dressed girl from a rock where she has been marooned by the rising tide, he mistakes her for a simple fishermaiden. Shortly afterward he himself is mistaken for a revenue officer, and but for the cleverness of the "fishermaid," who helps him to escape by a ruse, he would have been mobbed. An impending romance is interrupted by the call to rehearsals, and at the theater the author is annoyed by the manager's announcement that the leading lady insists on his play being changed in certain particulars, which, she insists, are not true to nature. The author is defiant, until he meets and recognizes his "Fishermaiden," when a truce is declared, and the romance of the summer is resumed, with every prospect of that "happy ending" so much desired in plays, footlight and photo.