"The worms they crept in" (1881)

[Sam Clements]

What do you make of this cite from 1881 using Newspaper archive?  It is an
article about making cider.

"To sweep away the sentiment from cider, let one visit the mill where is
pressed the saccharine juice.  Like the boy who prefered chestnuts boiled,
that he could eat worms and all, one discovers at the cider press that to
get the true wormy flavor of the apples, which is said to impart the snap to
cider, he must drink the juice of the fruit.  After seeing bushels of
windfalls, speckled, rotted and covered with soil and damp leaves, thrown
into the mill, from which the juice trickles out into a vat ridged with scum
and slime, one requires a strong stomach to relish cider.  The old cider
press is hauled out but annually, and the dust and webs of a twelvemonth
gather to be racked off in sweet cider.  The straw pitched down for the mash
has (like?) enough made a warm bed for fowls (since?) frost came:
hornyhanded men work the press and watch the "worms crawl out and worms
crawl in" as the apples are squeezed.  >>

This would indicate to me the song/verse was in the popular vocabulary at
the time.

Sam Clements