The people of the village hardly ever attended services at the church, so when the vicar went missing, it was a long time before anyone noticed; and then everyone assumed he had simply gone away for a while, as he had often done in the past.
In point of fact, he had died, and his posthumous punishment was this: he was condemned to conduct midnight services to which no-one would ever come, and preach an identical sermon to rows of empty pews. The villagers sometimes heard strange nocturnal sounds issuing from their church, but none of them bothered to investigate.
Nearby in the same village there lived a strange lady, who never appeared in public. Some people wondered whether anyone lived in her house at all; but in fact she was a hopeless insomniac: she always felt exhausted and was perpetually yawning, which made her so ashamed that she never ventured out. She would lie awake all night, despairing.
But one night she exclaimed out loud, "Oh, I would do anything for a good night's sleep!", and at that moment she was permitted to hear the faint sounds of the vicar's midnight service, and something induced her to rise from her comfortless bed and totter round to the church. She sank into a pew just as the vicar started his sermon, and within a few seconds she was fast asleep. The vicar was pardoned the rest of his penance.
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