LORD HALSBURY
informed, the young French sculptor Dallou, who was an artist of great talent, if not genius.
If some of Dallou's brilliant touches appeared on the tails and manes of the horses, on their hocks and pasterns, it is not likely that Boehm would have conscientiously cut them out. These assistants become "ghosts" only when their skill exceeds that of their employers.
Many years after this episode, when Sir Hardinge Gifford had taken his seat on the Woolsack as Lord Halsbury, and presided over the law lords who heard the cases that were referred to the House of Lords, Mr. Hugh Capron was dining at Murestead, and during the evening asked if I had seen in the papers the notice of the decision of the House of Lords on the Scottish Church case. He was surprised to hear me answer "No," and to follow it by asking what it was about. Shortly he recounted the story—how, on a point of doctrine, a small body of clergy and their scanty followers in some of the outlying northern islands of Scotland, had seceded from the body of the Free Church of Scotland, and had laid claim to all the property of the Church, including many millions in funds, all the schools, church buildings and colleges, and pursued that claim into the courts of Scotland, where they had been non-suited on several appeals, and how, not satisfied with the decision in their own courts, they had carried their case to the House of Lords, and there had obtained a reversion of the decisions in the courts in Scotland, and a verdict which carried with it the title to the vast property of the main body of the Church. After hearing this tale, to which Capron added that the Lord Chancellor Halsbury had delivered a weighty argument in favour of the "Wee Frees," as they were called, based on the dogmatism of certain seventeenth-century
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