But the heroic explorer would not give up. He and his little family stayed north of the Arctic Circle while he made discoveries and proved the truth of the statements of those who had been there before him. Little Snowbaby also made her observations. She saw Eskimo children living in their small round hives of ice, and heard them teasing their mothers for whale blubber and other kinds of grease, just as the children at home plead for candy or ice-cream. An Eskimo child likes a tallow candle much better than a stick of candy, and will chew the cotton candle-wick until there is no more grease left in it. Lieutenant Peary made eight trips to the Arctic regions. Sometimes he would advance farther north than any explorer before him; then, when he was almost within reach of the Pole, everything would fail and he would have to retreat and go back thousands of miles to the United States and begin to raise a fortune for the next attempt. At one time his ship, on the way to the north, would be caught in the ice and crushed like an egg-shell. On another occasion the boat would be frozen up in miles and miles of ice, so that he and his men would have to wait for spring to come and thaw it out of the clutches of the terrible white giant, Jack Frost. It needed the patience of Job to endure and overcome the trials which came thick and fast upon him. One summer the wealthy friend died who had promised him all the money he needed to reach the Pole; but a newspaper owner in London, England, offered his yacht, the _Windward_, for the next polar trip. This time the great Arctic explorer froze both his feet and had to have eight toes cut off. The cold was awful--from fifty-one to sixty-three degrees below zero. After many weeks of acute suffering, he was removed to a less severe climate. In 1902, for the seventh time, Peary came within a few degrees of the Pole, and finding that he could not go farther, was forced to return to the United States. In the first gloom of this defeat he wrote: “The game is off. My dream of sixteen years is ended. I have made the best fight I knew. I believe it has been a good one. But I cannot do the impossible.”