Unexpectedly he was ordered out to Canton to sail the _Agra_ to the Cape.
Then a novel and strange feeling came over him like a cloud; that feeling
was, a sense of personal danger: not that the many perils of the deep
were new to him: he had faced them this five-and-twenty years: but till
now they were little present to his imagination: they used to come, be
encountered, be gone: but now, though absent, they darkened the way. It
was the pocket-book. The material treasure, the hard cash, which had
lately set him in a glow, seemed now to load his chest and hang heavy
round the neck of his heart. Sailors are more or less superstitious, and
men are creatures of habit, even in their courage. Now David had never
gone to sea with a lot of money on him before. As he was a stout-hearted
man, these vague forebodings would, perhaps, have cleared away with the
bustle, when the _Agra_ set her studding sails off Macao, but for a piece
of positive intelligence he had picked up at Lin-Tin. The Chinese admiral
had warned him of a pirate, a daring pirate, who had been lately cruising
in these waters: first heard of south the line, but had since taken a
Russian ship at the very mouth of the Canton river, murdered the crew in
sight of land, and sold the women for slaves, or worse.
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