This is a collection of myths and legends about music from around the world, spanning in time from ancient Greece to medieval Europe. The Greek myths featured are the births of Pan and Mercury, story of Pan and Syrinx and the contest between Apollo and Pan. Each chapter ends with a list of music pieces relevant to the music discussed in the chapter. For example, the story about Mercury's invention of the lyre ends with a list of 25 selections on instruments descended from the lyre. There is a black and white image at the start of each chapter; these are either reproductions of relevant existing art (e.g. H.A. Bone's drawing of King Alfred and the Danes) or photographs of museum exhibits (e.g. a statue of Apollo, a Crusader model). The book starts with a foreword by music appreciation advocate Frances Elliott Clark in praise of the text.

Featured Stories:

• Pan and His Pipes,
• The Tortoise that Gave the World Music (birth of Hermes, King Midas),
• The Holy Bird (Fung Hoang the Chinese bird),
• The Harp King Alfred Played (history of harps, Alfred and the Vikings),
• Stephen, the Child Crusader (a medieval story),
• When Knighthood was in Flower (the Troubadours: de Coucy and Gabrielle, Blondel, Walther von der Vogelweide),
• The Violin Makers of Cremona (stories of violins),
• A Star and a Song (the Nativity),
• The Holy Grail,
• The Songs of Hiawatha (Native American story of the Naked Bear, Hiawatha and his marriage).

The foreword by Frances Elliott Clark introduces these stories as fairy tales about music, following the trend of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century myth anthologies calling their Greek myths fairy tales. Clark also asserts the supposed universal appeal of these stories to children, claiming that "All children love' fairy tales such as these" (p. 5).

Cather begins by retelling the Homeric Hymn to Pan, with Mercury carrying his baby son Pan to Olympus where the infant Pan delights the other gods. She tells readers Pan was the ugliest thing ever seen, but it did not matter because "He was a very happy little fellow' and so he was loved" (p. 7). 

Pan grows up and is able to make nymphs happy with his presence because he is the god of springtime. Cather emphasises at length how joyful and wonderful his character is. As is common in children's myth books, she also makes Pan a childlike character so as to be more identifiable - he sees the world as his "playground", for example (p. 8).

The Syrinx myth is presented as a sad cautionary story about the folly of wanting too much. Pan, it is explained, should have been happy with the love of the shepherds and dryads but he, "like mortal boys and girls, sometimes desired what was not good for [him]" (p. 8). He sees Syrinx and calls to her, but she runs away because "she did not know that one may be hideous to look upon, yet very beautiful within, and she saw not his joyous heart and sunny nature" (p. 9). Therefore Syrinx is shown to be shallow and to run from Pan because of his looks. The fact that Pan pursues her in Ovid in order to rape her, and how sinister this is, is not examined, although Pan's pursuit is replicated from Ovid unaltered.

Cather ends her Pan chapter by linking him to Christianity. She tells the reader that when they go to church and look at the great organ there, they will see the evolution of Pan's pipes.

The Tortoise that Gave the World Music, meanwhile, begins with a retelling of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and again presents an idyllic view of the mythological world. When baby Mercury first explores the world, he thinks "it was a wonderful world filled with wonderful things" (p. 13). Instead of killing the tortoise, as in other versions, Mercury finds it already dead, and when he moves his hands across it "The ugly dead creature seemed to live and sing" (p. 13). Cather then retells the story of Pan and Apollo's music contest and how Apollo punishes Midas by giving him asses' ears.

Cather returns to her theme of music at the end of this story by claiming "the Greeks loved music as few people have loved it" (p. 16) and asserting that much of their public work and building was done as they sang and that is why their public works were so good.

In the present day, this text is relatively hard to find. It is not frequently reprinted as other out of copyright children's anthologies published at a similar time are, and it is more difficult to discover information about than some of Cather's other children's books. This may be in part due to its now unfashionable love for the Crusaders and of children potentially sacrificing their lives to go to war.

In the story of Stephen, the Child Crusader, Cather continues the theme of the protagonist's sweetness and lovability from the Pan story. The child Stephen hears about the Crusaders who are "going to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the violating hand of the Turk" (p. 35). He is then told by the spirit of a Saint to persuade other children to go to war "to redeem the holy places from the Moslem" (p. 36). Stephen leads an army of fifty thousand children on the Crusades, who all disappear never to be seen again. Cather asserts, however, that this is not an unhappy ending, because it persuaded adult men to follow "their pure and holy example" and join the Crusades themselves (p. 37). 

She implies the Crusaders finding and bringing back objects was also responsible for most of the learning and culture Europe derived from other countries around this time, including the introduction of new musical instruments. She is seemingly unaware of more complex processes of cultural exchange. The Crusader stories thus continue the theme of the development of music from the Pan and Mercury retellings, although the continuation is perhaps somewhat curious since Pan, Mercury and their musical innovation are presented as fictional not historical.

Cather also ignores the reality of sexual violence in war in favour of a monogamous chivalric ideal, claiming music evolved at this time because the chaste Crusader knights could not stop pining for their wives and ‘the loneliness and ache’ were so great they would spontaneously burst into songs of "love and heroism" (p. 38). This echoes the Pan story, where his pursuit of Syrinx is presented as unproblematic, what he intends to do when he catches her is not stated and the ending is presented as happy because it leads to the development of music. The story "When Knighthood was in Flower" also idealises the love between heroic and noble Crusaders and their female love interests back home, and valorises the English Crusader king Richard the Lionheart as a noble hero fighting for right.