A young docent finds confidence, and confusion, at the 0) Great Blacks in Wax Museum

He knows they are wax. Five days a week, he sees the figures standing motionless and eloquent. He knows they are wax. But the stories the figures tell are so powerful that sometimes their images follow him home, turning his dreams into nightmares.

William Redmond is 12 years old. Tuesdays through Thursdays for the past three summers, he has worked as a volunteer at the Great Blacks in Wax Museum interpreting exhibits, selling snowballs at the stand in front of the museum and working in the gift shop. About 14 other adolescents and teen-agers work here, as part of the museum's youth volunteer program.

William's uniform is oversized shorts, an enormous T-shirt that nearly covers his shorts, and white athletic shoes. He has a round face and a winning smile. This fall, he will be an eighth-grader at Cardinal Shehan Middle School. He can be found on the basketball court, he says, when he's not at the museum.

When William is sure that no museum visitors are watching, he perches carefully on the edge of a wooden display platform. In front of him, Rosa Parks is poised in the doorway of a Montgomery, Ala., bus. Her hands are cuffed, and a white policeman looms over her. Behind William, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stands, gazing into the distance.

William knows they are wax. But in the cool darkness of the museum, the figures possess an eerie reality; their faces lifelike, their stillness unnerving. Here is Harriet Tubman helping an escaped slave head north to freedom. There is Langston Hughes sitting at his desk - is he writing a poem? Over there is a re-creation of a slave ship. Enter it and see slaves, some naked, some bound, some ill and dying, crowded onto narrow shelves that serve as bunks. Sometimes, this scene stuns visitors into silence. Sometimes they leave in a hurry, unable to face its message. Sometimes they cry.

When William began volunteering at Great Blacks in Wax, he was just a kid: a fifth-grader. And the figures scared him. He has since come to terms with them. He nods at the railing that separates wax people from human beings. "To me, they're friendly now. They stay on their side, and I stay on mine."

He has learned a lot here. He can address a large group of adults without qualms. He can rattle off historically significant dates. And he can regale you with tales about Frederick Douglass, or tell you who the first African-American astronaut was, or explain why he wants to emulate King. What he can't tell you - and what he figures he'll never really be able to tell you - is how someone could sell a man as a slave, or lynch him, or deny him the right to vote.

"Sometimes I don't get to sleep because I can't figure out how people can do that to another human being. That's what keeps me awake sometimes."

Knowing that he can help museum visitors learn about history keeps him coming back. "I can see it in their faces that they can understand what I am talking about. First they get angry because sometimes they don't want to hear about this. But they listen anyway."

Great Blacks in Wax Museum, 1601 E. North Ave.

Chet Haack is making alphabet soup.

Here is the recipe, which has been handed down from generation to generation:

Preheat forge to 800 or 900 degrees.

BInto heavy metal pot, toss letters made of lead, tin and antimony. Toss in an "H" or two, add a "T," an "L" or an "X," a scattering of "Ps" and "Qs."

Season with punctuation marks.

Simmer until well blended.

In the dim light of the blacksmith shop at Baltimore's Museum of Industry, chunks of coal glow orange-red in the belly of the forge.

Haack stirs his silvery, molten porridge. He wears overalls, jeans, solid work boots and a double layer of shirts, and uses a heavy iron ladle, of his own making, to skim off impurities as they rise to the liquid's surface, like fat floating in broth.

Around him, heavy wooden tables and workbenches are covered with neat rows of dark iron tools, some that once were used by Haack's great-grandfather and grandfather, some collected by the museum and some that were made by Haack. There are hammers, chisels, tongs. Tongs that are shaped according to their function: one to hold fast a round metal bar, one for a flat bar, one for a bolt.

Haack stokes the fire with a long poker. Attention to detail is

important when one is working with metal so hot it shines white, and he approaches blacksmithing as he approaches life: deliberately.

Today he is melting down letters used by the museum's printers on a Mergenthaler Linotype printing press, a machine invented at the turn of the century. The molten liquid will be poured into lead molds, in which the metal will seem to pulse with heat for a few seconds, then gradually cool and harden into long bars. The bars will be used by printers to form new letters.

Haack is a blacksmith by avocation, and his skills are a blend of innate ability and vast knowledge gained through watching and learning. Born 82 years ago, in Fairview, N.J., he comes from a long line of woodworkers, cabinetmakers and folks with mechanical know-how.

He was 12 years old and living with an uncle in rural Sullivan County, N.Y., when he encountered blacksmithing for the first time. "The neighbor of my uncle was a real 'do-it-your-selfer,' " he says. "He was a mechanic with a blacksmith shop and a sawmill. When he would start a fire, I would run right over to watch."

Though Haack worked at Bethlehem Steel for 30 years, working his way up from machinist to general foreman of the electrical repair shop, he always found things that needed to be fixed and things that could be recycled, if only you took the time.

"Blacksmithing fitted in with my way of doing things," he says. "All I needed was a way to make heat and something to hammer on."

Used to be, if your horse needed a shoe, you called the farrier. If you had a chain with a weak link, you brought it to the village blacksmith. If your new house needed a weather vane, you could have one custom-made.

Haack can do all that. Every Saturday morning, he comes to the museum to forge whatever is needed and to demonstrate the craft of blacksmithing for visitors. Since he began volunteering at the museum, he has made hinges, tongs and ladles. He has hammered out pipe fittings and a poker to be used in the engine room of the 1906 tugboat the museum has restored.

A few years ago, Haack met a man young enough to be his grandson who seemed interested in blacksmithing. C.J. Groskopf is a 22-year-old who has a way with engines.

He is good with computers and installs wiring for telephone and alarm systems for a living. He builds steam engines for fun.

Now every Saturday morning, he comes to the museum to watch and to learn. He wears overalls and a long-sleeved shirt and heavy work boots, and he moves slowly and carefully as he adds another scoop of coal to the furnace or stokes the fire. He is the next link in the chain.

Baltimore Museum of Industry, 1415 Key Highway

Excerpts from a conversation with Dr. Hugh Francis Hicks, dentist, collector, founder and director of the Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting:

"This is the only museum in the world where you can see the complete history of the development of the Edison electric light bulb.

"I began collecting as a child. I started with everything - a light bulb coming my way was put aside carefully in a box or a drawer or whatever. Whether it was Christmas lights or a lamp bulb.

"I remember my father and I were down on Light Street once, and they had these huge lamp poles back in the late '20s - I was born in '23 so it was the late '20s - and they had these very, very large incandescent light bulbs and I saw a man changing one and I asked my father to stop and get it. He asked the man if he could have the old bulb, and the man said, 'Sure, take this one, too.' So I wound up with two. They were definitely my favorites for a long time. ...

"Now as we go on around the museum here, you'll see an interesting case with many, many tiny, little bulbs in it. We have about 60,000 pieces in our collection. We have about 8,000 on display. We have a cockpit bulb from the Enola Gay - documented by one of the crew members. Then we have two headlight lamps from, of all notorious cars, Heinrich Himmler's Mercedes-Benz.

"Now in this room, there is a complete history of Christmas lighting. The little tungsten bulbs, then the tapered bulbs, then the cone-shaped bulbs, and you can still buy them occasionally - these are the ones that if one burns out the others go, too. ...

"About 12 years ago, the Johns Hopkins University was given a $4 million grant to study collectors. Now, the idea was not to study one or two collectors, but go all around the world and find out what makes collectors tick. So they hired two psychiatrists and three psychologists and one of their first stops was here.

"Their visit wasn't anything you could have fun with - I mean, you're surrounded by psychiatrists. Well, I tried to explain that I was always very, very enthused with the electric light bulb. I was always fascinated with it as a child. An art form or whatever. ...

"I saw I wasn't penetrating, so I thought this is the time for the hooker - so I told them the truth:

"That the greatest bulb collector of all time was William J. Hammer, who worked with the Edison group, and he was their chief engineer. William J. Hammer collected 130,000 electric light bulbs before 1900. All different. And I said, 'Mr. Hammer died the month that I was born. Do you believe in reincarnation?'

"End of interview. 'Thank you, Dr. Hicks, for talking with us. Bye-bye now.'

"About a year and a half later, Hopkins published its monthly [report]. That monthly was dedicated entirely to collectors. For the 4 million bucks, this is what the American citizens got: Collectors collect for the fascination of the object, not its monetary value, not for exchange, not for trading. Just for the fascination."

Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting, 717 Washington Place.

Imagine that it is 1130 A.D. You are a monk painstakingly copying the Bible onto calfskin pages. Your quill pen, filled with -- the pale brown ink that you made from growths on oak trees, isn't working correctly. Your back hurts.

What are you thinking? Are you working alone? Is this a rush order for the archbishop? Does the little man sketched in the left margin of the page mean something? Is he simply camouflage for a mistake? Were you doodling?

These are some of the things that Domenic Marner is wonderingHe is a manuscript scholar from the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, and he is sitting in a small, L-shaped room on the fifth floor of the Walters Art Gallery. The room, with its rows of glass-encased bookshelves, resembles a library, but it's really a vault.

This is where the Walters' manuscript collection is kept. Thenormous volumes, usually designed for religious use, are often handwritten by monks, and illuminated - or illustrated - in brilliant inks made of gold, minerals or even small reddish bugs.

With their elegant script and vivid illustrations, they seem formalperhaps untouchable. But they were written for people to use during that most intimate of acts: prayer. And under intense scholarly scrutiny, manuscripts are revealed as profoundly human works.

Mistakes - perhaps a dab of ink in the wrong place - sometimeare covered up with a little picture. A dropped line may be added at the bottom of the page with an ornate arrow, or even a little man pointing to its rightful place in the text. Little messages may be scrawled in the margins.

Scholars become devotees, almost worshipers of these rardocuments. They travel from museum to museum to touch their calfskin pages reverently, to pore over the texts, to scrutinize them under magnifying glasses. "When you look at these things in the flesh, as it were, you never know what you are going to find," Marner says.

The Walters manuscript collection includes 850 Western, Neaand Far Eastern medieval manuscripts, and 1,300 books printed before 1500. In the vaulted room where Marner sits, you could study an Italian 16th-century, ruby-encrusted book of seven psalms that is about the size of your thumb. Or you could read the Conradin Bible, made in 1280 for an emperor of Germany and illustrated with jousting knights. Or a first printed edition of Aristotle.

But none of these manuscripts particularly concerns Marner.

He is writing a book about the Puiset Bible, an illuminatemanuscript commissioned during the 1100s by Bishop Hugh du Puiset and housed in Durham Cathedral.

The Puiset Bible is one of only ten 12th-century illuminatemanuscripts in the world. The others are in places such as Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; Chester Betty Library in Dublin; the Bodleian Library in Oxford - and the Walters in Baltimore.

To study one 12th-century text, a scholar must pore over thothers, Marner says. "There aren't that many of these [manuscripts] on the planet; therefore, you have to look at all of them to get a sense of what is going on."

The Walters 12th-century manuscript is called the RochesteBible. At the moment, it sits grandly upon a red velvet cloth, as though royalty receiving a visitor. It's an enormous book - larger than any dictionary you've ever seen - with small, elegant script written in pale brown ink. The initial letters of each section are decorated in deep red, brilliant green and royal blue.

"It is a complete buzz to look at a manuscript: To opesomething so personal and so private a thing made a thousand years ago," Marner says. "I just love doing it."

The Walters Art Gallery, Charles and Centre streets.

Bugs can be serious business if you're 8 and it's summer and you are trying really hard to attach eight pipe-cleaner legs to a cardboard spider body.

Clarence Rubin puffs his cheeks out in concentration. He is a pretty careful boy. The kind who always remembers to raise his hand in class Ibefore shouting the answer. The kind who prefers math and science classes to recess. The kind who listens calmly to directions, then follows them without asking silly questions.

He frowns a little. Today is spider day at this summer workshop held at the Maryland Science Center, and Clarence, as you may have guessed, is the kind of kid who will work with the scissors and the cardboard and the paint and the pipe cleaners until his spider has eight, perfectly bent, creepy-crawly legs, a body that is as black as a moonless night and two truly awful eyes.

"All right!" he says under his breath when he's done.

The class he and six other children are taking is called "Explore and Discover: Insects" and is one of many children's programs given by the science center. On this sweltering summer day, the museum is jam-packed with parents and children - by closing time, as many as 2,500 folks will have passed through the exhibit halls. They are here to play on the bright red train or with the crane or the play-grocery store in Richard Scarry's "Busytown" exhibit. It is hard to make yourself heard without shouting.

But in a classroom on the museum's first floor where Clarence and his companions are learning about bugs, relative quiet reigns.

Rachel Hyman who begins second grade in the fall, says her favorite subject is art. When the class uses crayons to illustrate the stages of a spider's life, Rachel's spiders are orange with pink eyes or red and blue with black legs; their silken egg sacks are green, their babies are purple and red. Third-grader Frederic Kim says his favorite class is this: "mathsciencereadingrecessand

socialstudiesandrecess." He asks a lot of questions even though sometimes he already knows the answers. "Is Spiderman real? Is he an arachnid? What if he was real? I wish he was."

Angela Howard is a fourth grader who is almost always the first to finish a project whether she's turning plastic foam balls into beaded antennae or making honey butter (the better to understand bumble bees). Once, as the group was sitting in a circle working on an art project, she began whistling "Oh Susannah." Soon everyone was whistling.

Or almost everyone.

"I can't whistle yet," says Frederic. "But I can do this ..." and he clucks using his tongue: "Clop, clop, clop."

Angela stops whistling and looks at Frederic thoughtfully. Then she clucks, "Clop. Clop. Clop."

Soon everyone is clucking. And coloring. Clucking and coloring.

Maryland Science Center, 601 Light St.

My paint box holds all my favorite colors: Vermillion, sap green, raw sienna, yellow ochre, Prussian blue.

The box itself is cleverly constructed. It is wooden with delicate hinges and compartments to hold everything that I need: slender brushes with their hog's hair bristles, blocks of dried paint, a glass cup for water, a tiny stone palette, a wisp of a rag.

Sometimes when I'm in a hurry, I put my things away without cleaning up properly. Then you can peer into my box and see what colors I was using when I stopped painting. It's as though the colors have been frozen in time. Go ahead, peek inside. It's easy to see that I was blending water and paint into a deep orange.

I can't remember what I was painting. After all, at least 150 years have passed since I so hurriedly put my paints away.

My name is Anne Brooke Ellicott. My three sisters and brother and I live at Ellicott Mills. My father, George Ellicott, owns the land and grows wheat on it. These days, people call this place Ellicott City.

There's always a lot going on where I live. My father is a Quaker and is considered a gentleman of means. He is involved with many things: He is a good friend of artist and surveyor Benjamin Banneker.

One Christmas when I was little - I think it was in 1807 - he invited a delegation of Indians who had been visiting Washington to dinner. They had names like Chief Little Turtle.

It was January 1819 when I began traveling to Baltimore for drawing and painting lessons. I learned to sketch bouquets of flowers, scenes of Maryland landscapes. My favorite subjects, though, are faraway lands.

Whenever a picture in a magazine catches my eye, I cut it out and paste it into my scrapbook. Then I copy it. I've done sketches of ruins of castles with hills behind them. I've painted travelers as they meander by streams and through forests.

I cut out other things, too. Recipes. Prayers. Timetables for traveling. Odd bits of information. Do you know how much crockery was exported from Liverpool in 1819? I do: According to the Staffordshire Advertiser, 16,704 crates of crockery were exported from just that one city.

I've traveled, too. In 1820, I went to Detroit with my mother, some of my cousins and my sister Mary. I wrote in my journal every day. Inside the front cover, I kept track of all the letters I sent: On July 15, I wrote to my father; on the 19th, I wrote to my sister Patty; on the 26th to my sister Betty.

Here's some of what I wrote in my diary about Detroit:

"We saw a great many Indians living in their savage state we got to Detroit at 12 o'clock the town looks very handsome at a distance you have a view of the fort and Cathedral which has 5 steeples we put up at Woodwards Tavern which is pretty good after getting a good dinner we walked out the streets are wide but the houses are poor."

But the best part of the trip was when we stopped to see Niagara Falls. In my diary, I wrote:

"I had seen drawings of them but can truly say that when I came to view them for myself I was completely astonished it certainly is the most grand and sublime scene in nature to see a river one mile wide and 2 or three hundred feet in depth - dashing over rock 165 feet high with greatest velocity certainly grand beyond description."

Anne Brooke Ellicott's paint box, diary and scrapbook are owned by the Maryland Historical Society, 201 W. Monument St.