All this time I had had not a mouthful of breakfast, and we betook ourselves to Doney’s bottega to get a cup of coffee before going home.  But when we attempted this we found that it was more easily said than done.  The Via dei Malcontenti as well as the whole of the Piazza di Santa Croce was some five feet under water!  We succeeded, however, in getting aboard a large boat, which was already engaged in carrying bread to the people in the most deeply flooded parts of the town.  But all difficulty was not over.  Of course the street door of the Palazzo Berti was shut, and no earthly power could open it.  Our apartment was on the second floor.  Our landlord’s family occupied the primo.  Of course I could get in at their windows and then go up stairs.  And we had a ladder in the boat; but the mounting to the first floor by this ladder, placed on the little deck of the boat, as she was rocked by the torrent, was no easy matter, especially for me, who went first.  Eventually, however, Nicholson and I both entered the window, hospitably opened to receive us, in safety.

But it was one or two days before the flood subsided sufficiently for us to be provisioned in any other manner than by the boat; and for long years afterwards social events were dated in Florence as having happened “before or after the flood.”  In those days, and for many days subsequently to them, Florence did indeed—­as I have observed when speaking of the motives which induced us to settle there—­join to its other attractions that of being an economical place of residence.  Our money consisted of piastres, pauls, and crazie.  Eight of the latter were equal to a paul, ten of which were equivalent to a piastre.  The value of the paul was, as nearly as possible, equal to fivepence-halfpenny English.  The lira—­the original representative of the leading denomination of our own l.s.d.—­no longer existed in—­the flesh I was going to say, but rather in—­the metal.  And it is rather curious, that just as the guinea remained, and indeed remains, a constantly-used term of speech after it has ceased to exist as current coin, so the scudo remained, in Tuscany, no longer visible or current, but retained as an integer in accounts of the larger sort.  If you bought or sold house or land, for instance, you talked of scudi.  In more every-day matters piastre or “francesconi” were the integers used, the latter being only a synonym for the former.  And the proportion in value of the scudo and the piastre was exactly the same as that of the guinea and the sovereign, the former being worth ten and a half pauls, and the latter ten.  The handsomest and best preserved coin ordinarily current was the florin, worth two pauls and a half.  Gold we rarely saw, but golden sequins (zecchini) were in existence, and were traditionally used, as it was said, for I have no experience in the matter, in the payment by the government of prizes won in the lottery.