We used to play with the mercury that we recovered after a thermometer broke when I was a child. There were little balls of mercury on my mom's desk for years, and she lived to 101. My dad (a chem teacher) always had a small vial of mercury on hand that we could examine. This mercury was in the liquid silver form -- not the powdered form which I found stored on a shelf in our manufacturing plant. A couple of pounds of the powdered mercury cost me a couple of hundred dollars to surrender to the county Haz Mat folks.
We used to play with old mercury when I was a kid too. Don’t remember actually touching it, though. Even though the quantity was small, there was just something fascinating about it. Interesting that the fascination has spanned time and cultures.