Some years ago I was in a mercury mine in Slovenia. Most of it was bounded in minerals, but between some rocks you could see tiny droplets of mercury. Also the floor/paths in the mine were shinny, all very small pieces mercury. Nice to see.
It's rare to see pure mercury like that at a mine unless the ore has been processed but it does happen with very rich ore. I've worked on the cleanup at several mercury mines, one had very rich ore like that. They also had a very inefficient smelting operation that rained mercury down on all the workers. One story from an old miner was about the workers that had to clean out from under the smelter. They would only work them a few weeks until they started getting the shakes from the mercury exposure. They would send them home and replace them with other worker until the shaking stopped. That's some serious exposure.
When I was a kid, (I;m 77 now) we use to play around with mercury from thermometers even in school. I seem to recall coating coins (nickel?) with mercury and playing with their interesting flow characteristics. I;m not saying mercury is good for you. But, it seems like it was a very common product back then.
I did the same thing in school, there's a reason they don't do that anymore. It was a common product that had a lot of great uses but almost all those uses have been replaced with modern technology.
Beads of elemental mercury are not as bio-available as vapors or mercury oxide. Mercury boils at 674 F but, like water, it evaporates at room temperature. Those toxic vapors, besides being poisonous to breathe, will move around your house and condense on cold objects like windows or cold walls. Trying to clean a house contaminated with mercury is like chasing a ghost. It gets into porous objects like wood, concrete, carpet, furniture, bedding, clothing, etc and those items can't be cleaned. We send contaminated items like that to a hazardous waste landfill. Sometimes heating them can drive off the mercury but that's rarely successful. We often have to pull up carpet and take out sub flooring. I've seen it go through the carpet, carpet pad and sub flooring, we found beads on the plastic vapor barrier in the crawl space. I once sent an entire vehicle to a landfill because someone spilled mercury in it. I've seen very sick children that were exposed and had to spend a lot of time being treated in the hospital. They likely suffered permanent brain damage to some extent. It's amazing how often we get called out to cleanup someones home and it's often devastating to the families. It's not just children, adults break thermometers or spill a container of mercury that they found in the garage. it's just best not to have it in your home, it's not needed and accidents happen.