Eleven-year-old Ellen finds herself wrongly accused of stealing while selling flowers on the Liverpool docks. In her escape she becomes a stowaway aboard a steamship bound for Canada, an unwilling member of a band of orphans headed for new families on the Prairies. Adopted by the Aitkens, a family on a Manitoba homestead, she soon lands herself at the centre of a number of calamities, unexpectedly learning about rural life in the New World and the value of family ties, both those forged in blood and those forged in trust.