"Rescued by Rover" (1905) meets Keystone Kops, the father of the year in this short chase comedy, from Thanhouser's Falstaff label, abandons his child so as to go talk to some other guy a little ways over. Another man picks up the baby to go find their caretaker. Meanwhile, a girl leaves her doll in the place where the baby was, and the doll is subsequently grabbed by a dog who runs away with it. Believing it the real baby, the father chases after rover and doll in an extended chase sequence, which includes a few basic trick shots of the day. It's kind of amusing, I suppose, in a violent, slapstick sort of way, and the effects would've only been impressive had they been in a film of several years prior.
In introducing and discussing this short for the 39th Pordenone Silent Film Festival, the festival's director Jay Weissberg mentioned the work that Ned Thanhouser has done in tracking down the films from the studio that is his family legacy. Indeed, due to his work and that of preservations, such as those at the Library of Congress responsible for this one, we're privileged to know more about Thanhouser, the producers of "Toodles, Tom and Trouble," as well as more interesting work such as "The Evidence of the Film" (1913), than about some contemporary major studios. According to Ned Thanhouser, the company produced 1,086 pictures in seven-and-a-half years, and some 260 of them survive. A good number of these have been made available on home video and online.