A railroad train is bearing down upon the hero, or maybe it is a sawmill, or a band of savage Indians. Death seems certain. And if there is a heroine, something worse than death awaits her--that is, from the Indians. Sawmills draw no sex distinctions. At any rate, things look very black for hero and heroine, but curiously enough, even at the darkest moment, I have never been able to get a bet down on the outcome. Somehow or other the relief party always arrives just in time, on foot, or horseback, or even through the air. The worst of it is that everybody, except the hero and the heroine and the villain, knows that the unexpected is certain to happen. It is not a betting proposition and yet it remains one of the most thrilling of all theatrical plots. William Archer proves in _The Green Goddess_ that he is what Broadway calls a showman, as well as being the most famous technician of his day. He has taken the oldest plot in the world and developed it into the most exciting melodrama of the season. Curiously enough, Mr. Archer has said that when he first thought of the idea for _The Green Goddess_ he wanted to induce Shaw to collaborate with him on the play. It would have been an interesting combination. Shaw might have fooled everybody by following the probabilities and killing the heroine and hero coldly and completely. Mr. Archer, however, as the author of _Play Making_, knows that it is wrong to fool an audience, and so he kills only one of the beleaguered party, which is hardly a misfortune, since it enables the heroine, after a decent period of mourning, to marry the man she loves. As the Scriptures have it, joy cometh in the mourning. Archer probably did not set out to show just how much better he could do with a thriller than Theodore Kroner or Owen Davis. His scheme was broader than that. Satire was in his mind as well as melodrama. He began his play with much deft foolery at the expense of the imperially minded English, by making his villainous rajah far more wise in life and literature than his English captives. When the rajah asks the brave English captain which play of Shaw he prefers, the gallant officer replies acidly: "I never read a line of the fellow." At this point in the play Mr. Archer and Mr. Arliss between them have succeeded in making the rajah such an altogether attractive person that a majority of the people in the audience are eager to have him obtain his revenge and quite reconciled to the heroine's accepting his marked attentions and becoming the chief wife in the royal harem of Rukh.