Through the town where Mr. Winkler lived one could smell of______.

The town in which Mr. Winkler lived was set back from the ocean against a wall of great cliffs, and the air around the houses smelled strongly of fish. One might have supposed that sick fish went up to be dipped in the air. As sick people sometimes go down to be dipped in the sea. There were a few small shops in the town and the harbor handled some shipping, but for the most part the town was less active than the sea. After he finished his lunch, Mr. Winkler usually went for a stroll on the beach. The beach was a desert of heaps of sand and stones tumbling about, and the sea did what it liked. What it liked most was to destroy. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and washed away the coastline.
    As the day declined into afternoon, and the air, which had been quite clear, began to fill with mist, Mr. Winkler’s thoughts also seemed to cloud. They raced and mingled in such a hasty fashion that by the time Mr. Winkler finished dinner, after dark, his mind was busily digging in the live red coals of the fireplace. Now a bottle of good wine after dinner does a digger in the coals no harm except that it has a tendency to throw him out of work, but Mr. Winkler, who had been idle for a long time, poured out his last glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of satisfaction as is ever to be found in an elderly gentleman who has reached the end of a bottle.