The Fairies are counterparts of mankind. There are children and old people among them; they practice all kinds of trades and handicrafts; they possess cattle, dogs, arms; they require food, clothing, sleep; they are liable to disease, and can be killed. People entering their brughs, have found the inmates engaged in similar occupations to mankind, the women spinning, weaving, grinding meal, baking, cooking, churning, etc., and the men sleeping, dancing, and making merry, or sitting round a fire in the middle of the floor. Some Fairy families or communities are poorer than others, and borrow meal and other articles of domestic use from each other and from their neighbours of mankind.

The fairies have a great reputation for various skills. They are seen and heard working on their own account, they teach skills to mortals and they do work for them. Of the crafts in which fairies are distinguished, the most curious and contradictory is smithy work, when we consider the fairies' fear of cold iron. Gnomes and dwarves are reputed metal-workers, and many famous swords and breastplates were wrought by them.

Lepracauns were reputed to be highly skilled at shoemaking, but since there is no record that they made shoes for other than fairy feet, there is no certitude.

Goblins labouring in the mines were proverbial in the 17th century for producing no results by their deedy labours. Boat-building, on the other hand, was a work on which they nightly laboured and which they could transfer to human protégés. The men have smithies, in which they make the Fairy arrows and other weapons.

Fairy food consists principally of things intended for human food, of which the elves take the substance, fruit, or benefit, leaving the semblance or appearance to men themselves. In his manner they take cows, sheep, goats, meal, sowens, the produce of the land, �?Cattle falling over rocks are particularly liable to being taken by them, and milk spilt in coming from the dairy is theirs by right. They have, of food peculiar to themselves and not acquired from men, the root of silver weed (brisgein), the stalks of heather (cuiseagan an fhraoich), the milk of the red deer hinds and of goats, weeds gathered in the fields, and barleymeal. The brisgein is a root plentifully turned up by the plough in spring, and ranked in olden times as the `seventh bread'. Its inferior quality and its being found underground, are probably the cause of its being assigned to the Fairies.